The search for automation
After just a small amount of time thinking about this, it became readily apparent that traditional page production tools such as Front Page would just not be up to the task. If we chose to use such a page production tool, the nightmare scenario of trying to find one missing tag at midnight before a journal was due among hundreds of thousands of lines of HTML would almost undoubtedly become a reality sooner rather than later. In other words, we needed to automate. You can see an example of HTML in Figure A.
Figure A. This gobbledygook is a typical example of the HTML that’s required in an online document.
Now, honestly, I didn’t want to build an automation tool. I was convinced that there ought to be something out there that would do the job for me. So I put a person on the project of locating something that would do what we needed. I knew of a much lower-level tool, called UserLand Frontier, with which you could build this software. My old boss (from a job I held more than a decade before) built it. Back in 1997, Frontier was available for free.
"Thus began the development for what was to become ZENPRESS, The Internet Printing Press"
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I also knew of a much higher-end piece of software that could be customized for what we needed called Vignette Story Server, but it would cost about $30,000 before customization and a final solution would cost more than $250,000 -- and that was way out of our range.
What we didn't find was a tool that suited an editorial focus. By degree, I’m a computer scientist and a programmer, but my staff is not. Our people have good writing skills, and good editing skills and good organizational skills – all fine characteristics of your typical editor. But they were just not programmers. I needed something that would let them be editors and not have to become programmers.
For example, I needed something that would let them decide when to break a page and when to not break a page (in other words, split an article into two or more parts, and let the editor decide where that split was to occur). I needed a tool that would help them decide what would be a feature article and what wouldn't. These are all editorial-level decisions and shouldn’t be hampered by the need to do programming to produce an issue of the publication.
What we needed was a tool that they could communicate with us on an editorial decision-making level, like that shown in Figure B, as opposed to a tool that they would communicate with us as though we were (or needed to be) programmers. We found nothing that would do that. In the spring of 1997, it became apparent that I was going to need to build this thing.
Figure B. We needed a professional tool that was designed for editors, not programmers, Webmasters, graphic designers, or hobbyists.
I decided to use UserLand Frontier as the development environment for ZENPRESS (this is a language/implementation choice; other options included Visual Basic, C++, Java, and so forth -- PHP, Zope, and MySQL weren't really prevalent back then). One of the things that Frontier does for us is automatically convert URLs (i.e., Univeral Resource Locators) and email addresses into links. It also provides the low-level database functions and reads and writes text and HTML files. Beyond that, we had some serious programming ahead.
Our goal was to launch our first journal in January of 1998. This was to become PalmPower Magazine. I had to get something up and running in six to nine months that would at least get us through our first journal. Thus began the development for what was to become ZENPRESS, The Internet Printing Press.
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