Relaunch of the Tameri Guide for Writers

Last updated on December 9, 2023

Writing, revising, and editing content needs to be convenient, or mistakes go uncorrected and content goes “stale.” The Tameri Guide for Writers has pages with errors. Many pages are incomplete. Other pages are stale.

Sometimes, things go wrong, yet lead to a positive change.

On November 19, 2023, our web server experienced a complete reset. Thankfully, we keep backups of everything. The reset led us to accept a reality we had been avoiding: it was time to move beyond static HTML maintained in Adobe Dreamweaver.

I complained about Dreamweaver in 2019. It was outdated then, and now it is more outdated. I began using Dreamweaver for the Tameri website and other projects back when the application was one of Macromedia’s products. When Adobe purchased Macromedia, I was pleased they didn’t discontinue Dreamweaver, instead choosing to let GoLive go away. After nearly a quarter-century of use, it is time for me to let go and move forward.

Dreamweaver was for website design, not content maintenance. Today, the tool fails to support current HTML5/CSS3 standards and trends. It’s no longer the best tool for designers, either.

Now, at the end of 2023, the entire Tameri Guide for Writers, along with our other websites, resides within WordPress. I’ll have less control over the appearance of content, with most of the layout determined by WordPress themes. Also, plain HTML sites are easier to copy and archive than WordPress sites. I could offer a list of reasons not to give up on raw HTML/CSS pages, but those reasons reflect my age and some nostalgia for a simpler World Wide Web.

Will the Tameri site and our other sites magically transform thanks to this migration? Of course not. But, now we can focus on content instead of struggling with outdated tools.

With the migration to WordPress, I can use MarsEdit to update pages and blog posts. Or, if I want, I can use JetPack tools for offline editing. I can also send posts to the blogs via email, as I once did with Blogger. The multiple ways to create new content and edit existing content free me from having to sync pages in Dreamweaver.

Grammarly, my go-to editing assistant, works in MarsEdit and online. No grammar app is perfect, but Grammarly helps me avoid embarrassment. The spellcheck in Dreamweaver was abysmal, and there was no grammar checking.

If someone emailed us about an error on a page, it would often take days for me to get around to downloading the page in Dreamweaver to make the correction. Now, I can access our pages and edit them from anywhere on almost any device.

In the early years of the Internet, the promise of the Web was quick and easy access to content. The technology often complicated content creation, getting in the way of the words, images, and sounds we wanted to share. I would promise updates to the Tameri site and others. Those updates never happened. Now, those overdue updates (some with 20 years or more in the queue) might happen.