Sunday, December 18, 2005
Very Helpful Shareware Text Editor
http://forum.myfreeforum.org/ftopic1350.php
One that really helped me this weekend is
the PS Pad shareware editor.
For the past 9 years, I had a 457 browser page free website on Geocities (Yahoo).
They finally closed it down last week, I presume, on the grounds that I made some criticisms of two different religions there.
I cannot fault them for their decision. I am aware that a few people lodged complaints over the years. It is hard to draw the line between what is abusive or a hate site, and what constitutes free speech, and a valid criticism.
After all, there are several well known scriptures of major religions that state in effect that other religions are false and demonic, which would make those writings come under the category of what we call "hate sites". Those religions plainly state that non believers are doomed to eternal punishment. On the other hand, anyone who takes an atheist position is basically saying that any religion is make-believe and that followers of such a religion are gullible, which could be construed as insulting, and constituting a "hate site".
But then, Marxist criticisms of capitalism and private property are threatening and insulting to capitalists. Proudhon wrote an essay entitled "Property is Theft". And the arguments of capitalism and democracy against communism or theocracy can be seen as equally thrreatening, hostile, and insulting.
When does innuendo become outright insult?
I must say, that, in retrospect, I am surprised that the site lasted for 9 years. Much less than 10 percent of the writings were controversial or offensive to anyone in any way. The rest was philosophy, theology, and things that no one would object to.
Anyway. My same website (with certain controversial pages omitted) has been at my AOL space for the same length of time.
So, I brushed up on my lost skills of AOL FTP to download everything to my hard drive, and then I used PS Pad to edit the html, to add a link to my message board, and to remove extraneous code left over from old guestbooks and page counters, and some code which used to be required at geocities in 1998.
The PS Pad works GREAT. It is exactly what I need, and it is free.
I feel much better doing something to keep my writings and ideas alive on the Internet in some form.
I realized one great error in my HTML design, which I am now addressing.
I copied the same email contact in each and every one of the 450 browser pages. It makes more sense to have a link in each page to a contact.htm page (thats what I called it). Then, if you want to change an email address, or add other contact information like ICQ, AIM, Yahoo ID, or MSN, you need only change that one page. You do not have to change hundreds of pages.
Years ago, I made the embarrassing mistake of spelling Gandhi as Ghandi. I just discovered PS Pad's ability to GLOBALLY change all occurances of a string in all files in a project directory. So I could make the correction of 70 errors in one fell swoop.
