How to Post Highly Functional, Quick and Easy Web Sites

fmt.exe is a tool I created some time ago for publishing news archive site. It turns out that with a few enhancements it is suitable for publishing various types of simple, flexible sites.

Benefits:

• easy to publish many pages with automatically generated indexes and page titles
• basic paragraphs and formatting added automatically, while allowing for advanced tags to be entered in the source text
• macros expand during html generation so you can change the root url and republish the entire site in minutes
• text to html conversion is very quick, so you can change the menu template and republish all pages quickly
• every html page is a complete stand-alone page with menu and fully qualified web links
• a) this means you can email the page and all links remain valid from an email client.
• b) it also means that external links to any page on your site will contain your site menu (unlike sites which depend on frames)

Limitations:

• inflexible page layout
• static html so you've got to ftp every page up to the server after changing the menu template for example
• currently supports only a basic menu and table format
• html page names are fixed because text to html processing is based on a sequential list of files, 0001.txt, 0002.txt, 0003.txt, etc.