>
>Howdy folks. Duncan, I hope you do decide to go with web hosting--I
>did (plug!), and didn't regret it.

Hi Mark, nice to hear from you.

Web-hosting is a serious possibility. At the moment the traffic I
envisage generating, my membership numbers, and the features I'd use
probably wouldn't justify it but on balance I think it would be best
to get familiar with the basic domain hosting ASAP.

One of my plans for www.smeed.org would be a family website to tie
together all the far-flung members of my immediate family. There's
also a few business opportunites. For example, my wife Pauline is a
freelance history researcher out-of-season and she has put together a
number of exhibitions for the local museum that she is the curator of
in-season. Pauline is pretty much a computer newbie - the cobbler's
children syndrome ;-) - but I can see big advantages for her and her
clients if she used Conversant. I could do all the hard work setting
up the templates, etc., and she can concentrate on the content.

>
>I am one of the people who jumped the EditThisPage ship to move to
>Conversant, and I haven't particularly regretted it. I know that
>Manila just rolled out themes, but I don't see how that would work
>at all in Conversant. Manila has

I looked at themes and at first site (pun intended) they seem
attractive but at the end of the day they are little more than a
gimmick geared at competing with the weblogger.coms of this world.
Conversant is so much more than a weblogger although at the moment
that is what I'm cutting my teeth on.

> one template for the whole site, but Conversant could have a
>different one for every page if you wanted. Although why you would
>want it...

I have a couple of templates just now - one for the weblog (home
page) and one for the main dg pages. The reason is simply that the
background images in the main text table I use in the weblog didn't
render well in NN 4.08 on the Mac so that's why that page has a plain
white background and the rest of the site has that muted graph paper
background (at least I hope it's muted as I can never be sure as I
use a PowerBook and sometimes there is a discrepancy between the way
others have their monitors set up and my (color calibrated) LCD.

>
>Duncan, if you're going to start writing HowTos, I think you should
>coordinate with other writer-type members of the Conversant
>community to provide a central clearinghouse for such things. People
>such as me, and Jim Roepcke (who's already written up at least one
>technical doc). We don't have to call it Conversant Newbies, we
>could call it something else...

Sure thing. I'm not really a writer-type and I had only envisaged my
howtos being used in a local context by my members but I'd be more
than happy to contribute to such a great community. As to the name -
plays on Conversant, first words, conversations, etc. conjure up all
sorts of possibilities. 'Becoming Conversant' comes immediately to
mind (and which prompted the change of subject title ;-))

Cheers,

Duncan