I'd heard Dave Winer enthusing about his new product, Manila, on his website http://www.scriptingnews.com for several months before I got to check it out myself. I started my own site and dinked around a bit, but then got the idea of starting sites for my kids.

My seven-year-old son Milo, absolutely LOVES this product! Watching him learn and helping him figure it out has really taught me the power of the tool.

Once you've created a site by surfing over to http://www.editthispage.com, you'll be presented with a congratulatory, welcome page. After you log in, the editorial menu appears at the top of the page and the Edit This Page button appears at the bottom. Soon the magic begins.

Click that button and you get a representation of your page as text. Just type away to change the content, then click Post Changes and voila, your site is updated.

Remember, no software is installed on your system, no separate web page editing program launches. This happens in your browser. And it doesn't much care between IE or Netscape either. And it certainly doesn't care about the OS you're running. Microsoft should fear this technology -- the first truly-compelling platformless web application I've seen.

With ETP, you can create
* Stories
* Pictures
* Shortcuts

A story is essentially a new page in your web. You give it a title, and type in its content. A picture also gets a title. You then upload the image file to the ETP server. Shortcuts are essentially hyperlinks. They too get a title and a URL.

Did you notice that all of the above get titles? Coincidence? Nope.

One of the biggest problems for creating websites is the linking. You've either got to type in your own <a href="http://blahblahblah... HTML crud or type the URL into some dialog to make it look right. In either case, you're really breaking your train of thought as you're writing.

ETP gets around this by looking for quotes. Put the title of a story, picture, or shortcut in double-quotes, and ETP will automatically either insert the picture at that point, or create a hyperlink to the other page. It took me -- an HTML hacker -- a little bit to get used to this, but not Milo. He figured it out immediately and took off running.

Milo knows that if he wants to create a new page about his newest favorite Pokemon character (a strong theme throughout his site), he clicks the Stories link on the editorial menu and from there clicks the Create New Story link. He also knows that Daddy can find pictures of his favorite cards on the web (ebay) and will upload them.

Like any kid, he gets frustrated when technology doesn't work. It's hard explaining why he periodically gets "This Page Can't Be Displayed" errors when posting changes to his stories. UserLand is hosting (as of 1/1/2000) 1500 ETP sites and the service isn't always snappy or consistent, but I suspect that will resolve itself over time.

This is a tremendously exciting product (service?) that will revolutionizes the way we do web-sites. It's definitely a v.1 product, but since it's server-based, I expect to see great improvements happening all the time. Watch this one!

Here's the address for Milo's page so you can see what he (and his Dad) are doing with ETP: http://milo.editthispage.com



Recommended: Yes