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Restaurant Management
By Josh Stone
A career in hotel and restaurant might be for you if you like to make important decisions, hire staff and run the day to the day operations of your business. It might sound like fun stuff but it is hard work. As a manager, you will be the first one to arrive and the last one to leave. All responsibility will fall on you. The perks of being in hotel and restaurant business, however, can be great.
As a manager, you are responsible for everything that goes on in your hotel or restaurant. You need to have food orders in on time, make sure guests are accommodated for and ensure that your staff respects and listens to you. You must be a great communicator and leader to succeed in hotel and restaurant management.
Whether it is a high profile hotel, a glamorous restaurant or a small deli, a manager must indulge himself in the business. If one thing goes wrong it falls on the manager's shoulders. The service industry is the biggest industry in the United States today. It garners more attention and customers than any other business in the country. Don't expect this trend to stop.
Small businesses are currently thriving in the U.S. More and more of these offices are popping up everywhere. Combine that with the stature of the service industry and a small hotel or restaurant can prove to be quite profitable. Being involved in hotel and restaurant is becoming a common experience for many people today. People with little to no experience are getting into the business. But those who do the best have a degree specializing in management.
It's a great time to become restaurant manager. The U.S. Department of Labor cites the field of restaurant as an emerging industry, and predicts it will continue to do so. As a restaurant manager, you are responsible for the day-to-day operations of the restaurant. Not only must you have a love of food, you must also have a background in management.
A restaurant manager needs to ensure food deliveries. Manage personnel, and enhance the customer experience. But of course that's also part of the reward - you get to enjoy the satisfaction of knowing that a successful restaurant was the result of your service skills. And not only will you have to fare well with your customers, you'll have to fare well with your staff.
Our articles continue...
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Managers must communicate well with the employees, motivate the staff, and lead by example. In restaurants that change their menu items, manager often select new dishes. They consider what items have been popular in the past, and what foods on hand must be used. Then they analyze recipes to decide costs for food and labor. Based on this analysis, they assign menu prices. Managers are often responsible for recruiting and hiring new kitchen and serving staff. They organize and direct worker training programs. In addition, they schedule staff work hours and assign duties. They may also evaluate employee performance. Large restaurants often have bookkeepers. However, managers of small facilities often have administrative duties. For example, they keep records of employee hours and wages. They prepare payroll and tax report paperwork. They keep records of purchases and pay suppliers. They also evaluate the success of new dishes and remove them from the menu if they are not profitable. Some managers use computer software to help them with these record-keeping duties. Almost three-fourths of all food service managers were previously restaurant managers, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most restaurant professionals receive a two- or four-year degree in restaurant or food service management. Nine out of ten restaurant operators raise money for charities, or donate food or space. Restaurants fight hunger, support health-related causes, mentor youth, and improve their communities. If you’re just starting out or your restaurant wants to increase its philanthropic efforts, you may donate money to support a children’s hospital, United Way, local non-profit, museum, library, school, zoo, military support group or homeless shelter. High standards need to be maintained, and health and hygiene safety regulations need to be met at all times. This includes the quality of raw ingredients and prepared food, food storage, and customer service. The maintenance of equipment, stock and the budget is also controlled by the restaurant/catering manager. Many independent hotels, and most hotel chains, run trainee schemes that can lead into restaurant or catering management. Fast-food chains, catering companies and large restaurants are also likely to run restaurant trainee schemes. Some employers may take on candidates with A levels, BTEC National awards, or Scottish Highers. However, it is more usual for entry requirements to include a foundation degree, BTEC HNC/HND, or degree. Relevant subjects you can study at this level include hospitality with business, culinary arts or marketing, and international hotel and restaurant management. The entry requirements for a degree are likely to include five GCSEs (A-C)/S grades (1-3) and a minimum of two A levels/three H grades. For a HNC/D or foundation degree, you are likely to need four GCSEs (A-C)/S grades (1-3) and one A level/two H grades. An Access to Higher Education qualification may also be accepted for entry to certain courses. If experienced in a related field, you may be able to gain recognition of skills through Accredited Prior Learning (APL). Please check with colleges or universities for exact entry requirements. There is no maximum age limit to become a restaurant or catering manager. Training is usually provided on the job. In addition, you can work towards a qualification such as an NVQ/SVQ Level 3 or BTEC National Certificate in Hospitality Supervision. If you are a graduate with a degree not related to hospitality, you can take a one year BA (Hons) conversion degree course in Hotel and Catering Management, or Hospitality Management. Restaurant or catering managers can take a number of routes into different careers. Hotel is an option. In a large chain of hotels or restaurants, it may be possible to progress to regional or area management. Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com Freelance writer for over eleven years.
Work Uniforms Restaurant Uniforms Dickies Nursing Uniform Scrubs
Here are some more management articles...
Email Marketing Software Leverages Limited Marketing Budgets
By Chris Robertson
In an era when giant retailers and mega-corporations are pouring millions of dollars into Internet marketing and advertising, owners of small- and medium-sized can become easily discouraged. With Read more...
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The Lean Manufacturing Assessment - A Brief Overview
By Bill Hanover
First off, even a Lean Assessment should be a Value-Adding experience for your company. It's not enough for a couple of consultants to drop-in, take a look around, and then send you a report that Read more...
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Problems Of Old-style Conferences
By Bill Weaver
When was the last time you heard anyone come up with a radically new and unconventional idea in an old-style conference or committee meeting? I can't remember one. Conferences are supposed to Read more...
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How To Get Rid Of Panic And Anxiety Through Self-help
By Nishanth Reddy
In our lives, we all want peace and happiness. We hope for a happy and pleasant environment around us all the time. However, to have all this we must be living in an ultimate world. However, we all Read more...
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| restaurant management news: |
Microsoft's new version of Windows, known as Vista, is not quite out yet, but many people are starting to test it out.
CityDesk is compatible with Vista, but you'll need to do a couple of things to get it working.
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Merijn van der Wijk from OrangeTree Project Solutions sent us news of QuickWebTool.
QuickWebTool is an add-on to CityDesk that provides the following features:
- Extra fields to store additional article information
- Scripting extensions that facilitate these fields and more
- Fast Site Tree browsing and edit of Articles, Pictures and Files
For more details, visit the QuickWebTool site, http://quickwebtool.otps.nl.
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creating Google Sitemaps.
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 Telepark launches Word-2-CityDesk, a Microsoft Word add-in that transfers Word documents to new CityDesk articles in a very smart way, saving tons of time and eliminating the usual pitfalls such as hidden HTML code in article fields, double paragraphs, etc.
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Ah, I spoke too soon. That workaround didn't work. But I found a better solution. We have now released CityDesk version 2.0.25, which fixes the problem, I hope, once and for all! (For details on the problem, click here.)
To upgrade to CityDesk 2.0.25:
If you are still getting crashes closing windows in CityDesk, we have a recommended workaround. Don't forget to reboot!
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uninstalling the patch (Microsoft KB891781).
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Crash Closing HTML or Template Window after installing February Windows Update. We have a workaround and we're working closely with Microsoft on a permanent solution.
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CityDesk Wizards website. It's a simple newsletter script that let's you easily manage multiple recipient lists and send newsletters to them.
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 Telepark just released a free CityDesk Database Scripter utility which enables everyone to write their own CTY/database manipulation utilities and share them with others. No deep technical knowledge required and fun to experiment with. There is also a command-line interface.
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People often ask how to generate a table in CityDesk. Here is a new approach using Javascript, an approach that lets you generate HTML tables without knowing any HTML.
It is one of the resources on www.citydeskwizards.com, a new CityDesk portal site just launched by Telepark. This site provides a number of resources useful to CityDesk users. There are Javascript Extensions and PHP Modules, which are ready-to-use scripts that provide innovative extensions to CityDesk features, such as the table generator above, and there are Wizards and FAQs and on and on.
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Telepark now offers a free CityDesk Wizard named JUUKA. Used together with the free CityDesk Starter Edition, you can easily put together a professional and attractive website containing up to 50 files without knowing any HTML. JUUKA has no time limitations and can be used to create and maintain your own websites. This template comes with a simple one-column layout (e.g. blog-style), automatic navigation menu generation, and article-based configuration.
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Brian Cantoni: “S5 is a new standards-based slideshow system developed by Eric Meyer. Rather than using a proprietary tool like Powerpoint, this system uses standard XHTML files with Javascript for navigation control and CSS for styling. The result is a presentation viewable with just a recent browser. To aid those who might be reluctant to edit XHTML files directly, I created a sample CityDesk project template.”
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 Telepark:
“The new HAAPAVESI template for the CityDesk CMS
automatically generates browser-centered sites with a beautiful
sliding menu. It supports pixel-precise site designs and features
many configuration parameters for stunning visuals and easy navigation.
No HTML coding required.”
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New article on using SCP, SFTP, or RDIST with CityDesk.
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This new article provides complete steps for getting up and running with ASP.Net in CityDesk, and comes with a CityDesk ASP.Net sample file that you can use to get started. This article will also get you started with using PHP or similar server side scripting languages in CityDesk.
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 RyanStudios: “I have designed a gallery maker for CityDesk, based in Nexus.cty (Author: Peter Mathijssen). It needs php on the side of the server.”
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Telepark's VANTAA Wizard automatically generates website menus and
navigation based on the folder structure in your site.
There is a Flash Demo online.
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From GreenWave Solutions, a very useful new add-in for CityDesk: “HTML DBScript can be used to add the results of database queries to your webpages. The queries are added to your pages before you publish them, so there is no need to run anything special on your webserver.”
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CityDesk is now supported in Brazil by MultiDoc, who will provide translated documentation, support, and local service.
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Congratulations to Telepark on the launch of WebWizards! You're definitely going to bookmark this site.
Year End News
from Joel Spolsky, CEO, Fog Creek Software
As the year draws to a close I'd like to bring you up to date on the latest news from Fog Creek Software.
 This has been a terrific year. Monthly sales of software licenses were about 250% higher than the same time last year, allowing us to pay salaries to the company founders (always appreciated), move into shiny new office space, hire new people, and start a summer internship program for college students. At the end of August we shipped a major new version of CityDesk, 2.0.
In the last half of 2003 most of our programming efforts were spent on two major porting projects. CityDesk is being fully internationalized (the first non-English version, German CityDesk, is almost complete). Our other product, FogBugz, is being ported to run on Unix-based servers, which is also almost complete. So even though we're working at full speed, both of these projects don't really help much for our existing customers, which is why it may feel like we're slowing down.
| “Unfortunately, that prediction turns out to have been, well, wrong.” |
In June I predicted that there would be another major version of CityDesk at the end of 2003. Unfortunately, that prediction turns out to have been, well, wrong. In the three years that Fog Creek has been in existence I have learned that every release takes a certain amount of time, usually three months, for the beta cycle and to stomp bugs. That means that if we did two releases a year, we would spend 6 months writing new code and 6 months in beta. If we do one release a year, we spend 9 months writing new code and 3 months in beta -- fifty percent more new code in the same amount of time.
Since CityDesk 2.0 only shipped on August 25th, and we have a beta cycle for German CityDesk in our future, it's just too early for another release. We've got some great new ideas for CityDesk and we'd rather code them up and get them to you as quickly as possible rather than go through yet another beta cycle without them. Some parts of the UI are being rewritten, and I would hate to waste time fixing bugs in old code that we plan to throw out anyway just to get a stable interim release. As usual, we thank you for your patience, and as usual, please don't buy our software if it doesn't already do what you need!
CityDesk has generated an incredible amount of enthusiasm. Everyone tells us it fills an important gap between the overpowered, overpriced "big iron" content management systems for large corporations and simple blogging tools, and we're proud of some of the great sites that were built with CityDesk: sites that highlight your creativity and the fantastic range of interesting voices on the web. I'm even prouder that companies like Telepark and Tintico are creating great new businesses by building better web sites for their customers -- web sites which anyone can update. That's the power of CityDesk and I thank you for your support and enthusiasm and wish you a happy and prosperous new year.
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Working with XML describes how to use XML and XSL files in CityDesk.
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Sydney Morning Herald: “In practice, CityDesk's polish makes most other site development tools feel crude - including those of six- and seven-digit-price CMS systems with browser interfaces.”
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Telepark have released their new FORSSA CityDesk Wizard which supports
2-level navigation based on a classic three-column layout and full-screen
design. “Based on a classic, 3-column layout which adapts to the browser’s window size, FORSSA enables a rich variety of designs and, thanks to its navigation features, keeps your site organized.” No HTML or CityScript coding is required.
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Knowledge Base: “CityDesk files are stored in a Microsoft Jet format database. This is the same format as Microsoft Access uses. Therefore, if you open a CityDesk file using Microsoft Access, you can see and manipulate all the data from a CityDesk site.”
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How to Create Breadcrumbs.
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It's true, the final, gold version of CityDesk 2.0 is now shipping! Yes, it's a completely free upgrade, and as promised, all Home Edition users will receive a free upgrade to the Professional Edition.
Now online: the CityDesk 2.0 documentation, including the definitive list of what's new in 2.0. If you still haven't seen it, we have two movies (in Flash format) with demos of the latest features. Bring popcorn!
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 The official release date for CityDesk 2.0 will be August 25th.
Telepark has release CityDesk Wizards, which allow you to generate a complete, professional website in under 60 minutes. They are using a very innovative ABC method ("Article Based Configuration") so you can configure the design of the website by editing an article.
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It’s here! CityDesk version 2.0.15, otherwise known as CityDesk 2.0 Release Candidate, has arrived, with the last few known bugs fixed. At this point there are no new features, only bug fixes, listed here.
If you have been using any version of the beta, please upgrade to the 2.0 release candidate. If you have been using 1.0, this is a pretty dang stable release thanks to the beta testers from four prior rounds of beta releases, so you can feel reasonably safe about using it. In a week or two if no major new problems crop up, we'll rerelease this as the Gold version of CityDesk 2.0.
Getting the Release Candidate
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A free special edition of CityDesk 2.0 allowing up to 100 files per site will be available exclusively on CD-ROM, as part of the August 14th edition of the German magazine Internet Intern.
In the discussion group, Mark explains how he uses the otherwise underutilized Audiences feature to create draft CityDesk articles and be certain they won't be published until they're ready.
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 The CityDesk Template Library is a place to post blank CityDesk sites that other people can download and use as a starting point for their own ideas. If you're a web designer, this is a great opportunity to show off some of your work!
2.0 Gets Closer
Early next week, if all goes well, we'll release what will, hopefully, be the last beta before the final version of 2.0! I'm calling it the “Release Candidate” because if it doesn't have any showstoppers it will be the final version of 2.0.
At this point we're happy to announce that all paid users of CityDesk 1.0, home or professional edition, will receive a free upgrade to CityDesk 2.0 Professional Edition. Yep, you heard me right. Even if you bought CityDesk 1.0 Home Edition, you'll get upgraded to the Professional Edition when 2.0 ships.
Why would we do something nutty like this? Well, I'm forced to admit, it's because the CityDesk Home Edition was a bit of a failure. We wanted to make a cheaper entry-level version of CityDesk, but in the end we made something that was too cheap to support profitably, and which ended up making people worry about article count limits and go to ridiculous lengths to keep their sites under 500 pages. It wasn't fair to sell a crippled version of the product at a price that we simply couldn't maintain, so we're going to stop selling the Home Edition altogether and as a parting gift we'll upgrade every existing Home Edition user onto the Professional Edition.
Many people have been asking for a version of CityDesk that can be given to contributors — novice end-users who simply need to create, edit, and delete articles, but for whom designer mode is overkill. So when 2.0 ships we will introduce a new Contributor Edition. This edition is the same as the Professional Edition minus designer mode. Pricing has not been announced but it will be significantly less than the Professional Edition. You won't want to buy the Contributor Edition alone, because there would be no way to set up a publish location (changing publish locations is a designer mode feature). But if you want to set up a site using your own Professional Edition and give it to your Aunt Ethel to maintain, you can get her the Contributor Edition at a lower cost and eliminate the possibility that she'll discover Designer Mode and mess up all your templates by mistake! More details will follow.
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The Next Beta Is Here!
CityDesk beta 2.0.7 is now available for download. (What's New?)
This release includes a lot of new code, especially around the article editor, so it's a little bit riskier than a normal beta. If you install this beta, please have an aggressive backup policy: use the automatic backup feature! If you're using CityDesk 2.0 for production work you may want to wait for the next beta, 2.0.9, which will be likely be more stable than 2.0.7.
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If you look closely at the source code for
this entry you may notice that it uses
lowercase <p> tags instead of <P>s.
That's the first, tiny visible effect of
the fact that we've done a bunch of work to
make it possible to create standards compliant
xhtml sites with CityDesk 2.0. In the discussion
group,
Joel
talks
about some of the programming
work we've done for the next release of the beta.
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Steven Den
Beste: “Citydesk cannot be
beaten.”
Larkware: “CopyBoy 2.0
is an assistant for FogCreek CityDesk 2.0”. Great stuff!
Crystal Ball Predictions about CityDesk 2.0. The current version of
the beta is the most stable version yet, so we’re going to allow
ourselves the luxury of a slightly longer period before the next beta comes out
in order to try to improve the HTML source preservation feature (or at least,
get it up to the level of quality as the rest of the product.) After that we'll
launch a much wider release candidate or two to shake out the last few system
configuration issues (those weird bugs that only show up on, say, the Polish
version of Windows), and finally go gold after that.
Crystal Ball Predictions about CityDesk 3.0. We don't know what it will
do, but it will ship this year. We'll decide how many new features to bite off
based on how much time we have to get a new release out in calendar year
2003.
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Another Beta Release Today
We're getting closer. There's a rather large pile of rather small bugs that
still need to be fixed; by "small bug" I mean things that happen very rarely or
only affect a small number of people or which are generally harmless, but we're
still going to fix them. That will probably take two or three more weeks, after
which we'll release our first "release candidate" to a much larger audience.
We do have a couple of blocking problems in
the last beta which were keeping people from getting work done, so we've
released Beta 2.0.5 today to address them. If the problem relating to extra
paragraph tags in one-paragraph fields was driving you nuts, upgrade. If you
want to try out thisFolder with nextLink,
upgrade. Otherwise wait for 2.0.7.
A quick reminder: beta software is not intended to be production quality or
used on important, production websites.
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 If you are working with
the CityDesk 2.0 beta, you'll be glad to know that the very
latest version, 2.0.3, is now
available. Remember, this is a beta, not the final release version; using it is entirely at your own risk!What's new in Beta 2 ? Active Channels Gwyn Cole shows us how to create an Internet Explorer Active Channel using Citydesk.
"Simply put, Active Channels allow you to provide an IE menu with your most recent items and articles. It also allows a more controlled offline mode when browsing."
For instructions, please visit Gwyn's blog.
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The next release of the CityDesk 2.0 beta is planned for Wednesday afternoon.
As usual, this is not a hard and fast date because we may discover things that
we really want to fix before releasing another beta.
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Beta Update: After a week, the first beta (2.0.1) seems to be working very nicely, with only two serious bugs:
- If you don't manually change your charset to UTF-8, non-English letters may not appear correctly. Workaround: add this right after your <head> tag: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
- If you upgrade a 1.0 site, you will have trouble creating new templates.
There are other small bugs, too. The next version of the beta (2.0.3) will fix these and some other bugs and will be available early next week, probably May 13. If you've told us about something via email or via the "Send Feedback" form in the product, don't worry, we know about it. Thanks!
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review of the CityDesk 2.0 beta.
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beta of CityDesk 2.0!
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Dave Keighan has posted a tutorial and template for creating Help files with CityDesk.
The CityDesk help file itself was created in CityDesk, of course! To see how we did it, download the source here (726KB zip).
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John Cesta: “Awesome. Not a word I use too often, not out loud anyway, but it’s the first word that comes to mind when I think about Fog Creek’s CityDesk program.”
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Richard Caetano: “Inherently CityDesk uses a database to store the articles of your website. It provides us with a set of fields associated with each article (headline, teaser, sidebar, extra1, and extra2). If we think of each article as a record, we'll have the option of using these fields as columns. In our example we'll build an employee directory using this idea.”
Now available: British Spelling Dictionaries. Download a ZIP file containing the British dictionaries for the CityDesk spell checker.
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RTidy/CityDesk is a Ruby script, provided as a Windows executable, which provides the ability to run HTML Tidy on an HTML file. It is intended to be run from CityDesk as a preview program from a local publication site. There is both a text-based interface and a graphical interface for progress display.”
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 CityDesk consultant David Burch has built a beautiful site with CityDesk focusing on Southern New Mexico.
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![[Image]](entries/2003/February/GreenCorner168.jpg) Green Media Toolshed, an environmental nonprofit, has launched a new training center implemented in CityDesk. “Before we purchased CityDesk,” reports Executive Director Martin Kearns, “we had little ability to create and post HTML that was clean and reliable. We had no ability to allow our staff (regardless of web/programming skill) to add content to our site. We really like the way CityDesk solved our problems. First, the file and folder system used by CityDesk makes it easy to organize our content and this organization is simple to explain to our staff. Now when someone on staff or an intern desires to contribute an article, it's as simple as clicking the 'new article' icon in City Desk and typing or pasting the content into the page.”
The site was built by Terry Kearns (no relation). “He worked with us to set up the CSS and template and handed the site to us for the content. Within a few days we had most of our site published and ready for the public.”
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Check it out!
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simple solution for small sites, using a CGI script.
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Read more.
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 John Sisk has created a very elegant CityDesk Templates site. If you need a template or have a template to share, this is the place!
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Telepark has created two videos showcasing CityDesk. The first is an introductory video about working with CityDesk. The second is a tip on how to do bookmarks within an article. (Note: Windows Media Player 9 is required.)
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explains how you can deal with them, too.
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CityDesk VAR Tintico has launched in Colombia. Their first client is the local Dutch Embassy which has converted their Spanish and Dutch sites to CityDesk. “The people at the Dutch Embassy are very happy, since now they can make changes and publish news and announcements from their desktop PC without calling a web specialist,” said Pablo A. Pinzón, Managing Director of Tintico.
Also check out the Spanish-language manual Tintico created for the site.
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 Sam Strachan talks about how he built the Hughes Models site with CityDesk, Coolmenus, and Alladyn. “The end result of our efforts is a fantastic looking site, which is easily updated and maintained.... Prior to CityDesk, this sort of thing would take serious time and effort, if not to build then to maintain.”
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We have a new URL!
This site will now be located at http://citydesknews.com. Bookmark the new location!
The Fog Creek CityDesk crew is interested in hearing some of your feedback about CityDesk News. Do you think this site should contain general news about web design, even if it's not directly related to CityDesk? Or only CityDesk specific news? What would you change about CityDesk news to make it more useful? Let us know on the discussion board! Don't be bashful!
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Fog Creek Software is shipping their new software team management product, FogBugz 3.0. Great for web teams, too.
Top Ten Digital Photography Tips
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not killing them.” A review of the movie Fear Dot Com.
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37signals: “Why would any retail Web site feature a product on its homepage without giving you the chance to easily buy or learn more about that product?” [Amusing, but I think that 37signals is just missing the point about how fashion branding works. — Joel]
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Gerry McGovern: “If I had to choose between my website and my newsletter, I'd choose my newsletter. That's because my newsletter allows me to establish a consistent, long-term connection with my readers. It allows me to establish credibility.”
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Cedar Valley Systems has developed an impressive site for the Nazareth Evangelical Lutheran Church in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Designer Jason Wellnitz: “I designed the site to use CityDesk as the site's main content management system. Last week I trained the whole staff on how to update articles. They were all very receptive.” Check out, for example, the news section and the ministries section, which allows Church staffers to keep their own sections of the site up to date.
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Munich-based CityDesk VAR Telepark has four impressive new CityDesk sites (in German) which really show off the versatility of CityDesk (and the great graphic design talents of Telepark):
Also check out Herff.com.
Steven den Beste emailed us: “When you look at Blogger sites, or Manila sites, there's usually a striking resemblance, like how siblings usually look like one another. I know it's possible to make Manila look a lot different, but somehow most of them end up looking like Winer clones (gad). What struck me was that there was no evident similarity at all among the CityDesk sites.” Indeed our goal was to create a product that could be used to create any “shape” web site, not just blogs with their reverse-chronological style.
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Paul Adams explains how to provide a custom 404 error page that's more useful than the default. Here at Fog Creek, we use CityDesk to generate our 404 error page; there's no reason your 404 page can use CityScript and templates. With some creativity you can do really cool stuff. For example, set a keyword “(404)” on the most popular pages of your site, then use CityScript with the condition (keyword_contains "(404)") so that anybody mistyping a URL at your site gets an index of popular pages.
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list of techniques for creating CSS and style sheets that work on a wide variety of browsers by hiding parts of the style sheet from browsers that don't recognize that part. “Although some feel the browser wars are behind us, their sad legacy persists. Every time an author has to code a workaround to make Navigator 4.x happy, every time a Web page comes up differently in different browsers, an echo of the wars lives on. Fortunately, there are ways to take advantage of these same browser flaws to make our lives a little easier.”
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Emily Baum: “Lucky for you, I'm willing to sacrifice my time and bandwidth for my own selfish pleasures. I am going to learn how to add sound, animation, and text effects to my website. And I'm going to do it all without using Flash!”
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Search engine expert Danny Sullivan: “The value of adding meta keywords tags to pages seems little worth the time. In my opinion, the meta keywords tag is dead, dead, dead... I say good riddance!”
Carefully crafted titles are far more useful in getting good search engine placement. In CityDesk, if you have a variable named siteName, you can put it in the title of every page by putting
<title>{$.siteName$}</title>
in your template. You can add the headline too, for even more relevance:
<title>{$.headline$} - {$.siteName$}</title>
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Vin Crosbie: “For a report I did recently, I spent six weeks talking to managing directors, marketing directors, and managing editors of many major online publications that, for an appreciable amount of time, have charged subscribers for access. Each is a major brand with marketing and promotional muscle. Hardly any of these executives are willing to talk for the record, but all were rather candid about how they have induced only between 0.25 and 1.25 percent of their unique users to pay for access to traditional content.”
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 Ah! Danny Goodman has released the new version of Dynamic HTML. It's been a few years since the first edition, which is still the best reference on HTML despite being severely out of date. The new edition is 1400 packed pages that actually tells you what web browsers that are actually in use actually do, which makes it invaluable. It has been brought up to date with all the latest browsers and the newest HTML specs. If you're working with HTML in any way, shape, or form, this book is an absolute requirement.
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tutorial on creating CityDesk sites.
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Mark Newhouse: “In this article, I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page.”
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DesignMeme: “Do you create a daily online comic, or post any other type of daily image file that you'd like to share with others? If you do, and you’d like people to be able to include your content on their webpages, the following script will help you get started.” This is a great technique for including any content from one web site in another website.
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Nick Finck: “There is an unspoken rule in print which states that text should not exceed four inches in width on a page. Any text less than four inches is more readable than any text over four inches — the reader's whiplash will speak for itself.”
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 When you're creating a CityDesk site to give to end-users, it often helps to provide some simple, written step-by-step instructions on how to do common tasks for that site. The CityDesk documentation will tell anyone how to create an article, but when you've made a Real Estate listing site for Marge the Realtor, Marge is going to need to know how to add a new listing: what folder to put it in, what values to put in what fields, etc.
Terry Kearns has created an excellent example of this kind of end-user CityDesk documentation here.
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You can do some pretty amazing things with Dynamic HTML (DHTML), but incompatibilities between web browsers has usually meant you have to struggle with several separate versions of your code to get anything to work at all.
A tiny Javascript library from Poland called Alladyn lets you create spectacular animation effects in DHTML that look like Flash, but without... Flash! And they work on almost any modern browser using very clever techniques to achieve compatibility. Check out their gallery, you'll be amazed at what's possible.
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Jesse James Garrett: “The advent of content management systems has been a boon in many ways, but the readability of URLs is not one of them. Databases don’t give assets names; instead, they need formulas for retrieving those assets. CMS developers, figuring nobody reads URLs, simply embedded those formulas right there. Sometimes that would manifest itself as just an inscrutable number; at other times, the URL would include a whole string of parameters needed for the CMS to function.”
Not CityDesk, of course! The first release of CityDesk used inscrutible numeric file names like all the big CMSs. But we actually listen to our customers, and fixed this in the very next release.
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Peter-Paul Koch: “Apart from being the most... er... graceful term in the web's working glossary, ‘graceful degradation’ is a simple but powerful technique. The first step in adapting that technique successfully is fluid thinking: accepting the unpredictability that rules the user interface of the web.”
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Hal Helms: “Scope creep is the pejorative name we give to the natural process by which clients discover what they really want.”
Joel on Software: “Customers Don't Know What They Want. Stop Expecting Customers to Know What They Want.”
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Bill Dawson has a collection of great CityDesk utilities and an API for reading CityDesk files. Check out bdCityDeskFloat, a floating window which shows you a CityDesk site and some of the attributes of each file in a convenient split-screen format. Here's what it looks like on last Friday's sample weblog (click for a full-sized image):
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 Fog Creek has a new template for weblogs. Just hit preview once you've downloaded it and opened it in CityDesk.
You'll find all the color settings are stored as variables which you can change at will. It also includes an automatically generated navigation bar and blogroll.
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template for weblogs. It uses php and MySQL on the server side to allow visitors to post comments.
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 Fog Creek Software remembers 9/11/01. Here in New York we had commemorated the one year anniversary with moments of silence (at 8:46 and 9:03 am, when the planes hit).
NYC Bloggers: “It is far above our poor power to say anything that can encompass the events of that day. But in bringing together bloggers from New York, we thought it fitting to provide a place for us to share our writing from that time.”
The discussion group has a way to print the number of articles matching a condition.
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styleswitch.cty (444 KB).
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DigitalWeb Magazine: 99.9% of Websites are Obsolete.
Justin's Links: Should Everything Be a WebLog?
Web Page Design for Designers: “This particular establishment serves the hottest, meanest Bangalore Phal in the known universe. Where other restaurants are content to use chile pepper symbols on their menus to indicate the spiciness of their dishes, this one uses mushroom clouds.”
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Joel Spolsky explains how CityDesk decides which articles to publish.
Mark Bernstein: “Living sites are only as good as today’s update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren’t there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.”
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Download our new template, jobpostings.cty (648KB). It was created to demonstrate creative ways in which CityDesk can be used to manage a job posting board. It shows some useful techniques like:
- including variables in CSS files
- using different classes of templates which specify the look and feel of different sections in the site
- a mechanism for including breadcrumbs for easy navigation.
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 The Pool-Room has an article about creating boxes easily using CityDesk variables.
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Making Dynamic Menus: DHTML Central has a new web standards-compliant Dynamic HTML menu system. It wouldn't be hard to modify this with CityScript to create menus whose contents are dynamically created from a list of articles in CityDesk. They have a whole bunch of other menu scripts, too.
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CycleTraders: “CycleTraders is a cooperative network of users that gather critical information about the status of each other's website. By running the client on your machine, you donate some of your computing time to measure the response time of other user's web pages. In return, your site is also timed by all the other users on the network, from a variety of locations and connections. This data can be analyzed to gauge response time from different geographical locations, at different connection speeds, and at different times of the day.  All this is automated through a web interface and an email reporting system.”
The Mercury News has a review of Sprint PCS Vision. “I'm betting PCS Vision (www.sprintpcs.com) will flop with consumers, at least in its initial form, because the features it offers just aren't compelling enough.”
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Did you ever wonder how we created the CityDesk help system?
Of course, we used CityDesk itself!
A single CityDesk file creates three versions of the help system:
That way any changes made to one version automatically appear in all versions. If you're interested in doing the same thing and want to see how we did it, you can download a copy of the CityDesk site we use to generate all our help files (705KB Zip).
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Dive Into Accessibility, 30 days to a more accessible web site, brought to you by Mark Pilgrim, the author of Dive Into Mark.
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 There's a new online demo of CityDesk. It's about 6 minutes long, a 2 MB download, in Flash format, and does a good job of illustrating the benefits of CityDesk over a typical web page editor.
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Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen: “Another example of harmful Web technology comes with the increasing use of style sheets, which let web designers specify the exact size of text down to the pixel. Unfortunately, many designers are using this ability, leading to reduced readability of an increasing number of websites.”
What Jakob is really complaining about is that Windows versions of IE do not give the user the ability to change the font size when the designer has specified an exact pixel size using CSS. You can see this here:
This text uses a relative font size
This text uses an absolute pixel size
If you have Internet Explorer on Windows, try zooming in and out (use the View | Text Size command) and you'll see that the top line adjusts while the bottom line does not.
Why do designers specify exact pixel sizes using CSS? Well, because a rather influential web design expert Jeffrey Zeldman argues (in our opinion incorrectly) that there is no choice, and it's really Internet Explorer's fault. He's right, it's Internet Explorer's fault, but since 80% of the visitors to the average site are using IE for Windows, blaming Microsoft is not a good enough reason to torture people who are more comfortable with larger fonts.
CityDesk's font size feature is old-school; it uses the “obsolete” but universal method of setting <FONT> tags with SIZE of 1 through 7, which can be zoomed in and out by users everywhere. Although CSS purists like Zeldman think you should never use retro FONT tags, the truth is they do work everywhere and provide better usability for IE Windows users, which is probably more important to most sites than CSS-political-correctness.
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 John Conners, who has one of the nicest CityDesk sites around, has written a tool that creates monthly calendars for CityDesk. Cool!
CityDesk is Not a Typewriter
Are you "sick" of 'ugly straight quotes' and -- worst -- double dashes?
When you want your web pages to look “really nice” — for that special occasion — you need to use Unicode entities in your HTML source. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by defining a few CityDesk variables. For example:
| Define |
as |
so you get |
when you type |
| LQ |
“ |
“ |
{$ .LQ $} |
| RQ |
” |
” |
{$ .RQ $} |
| LSQ |
‘ |
‘ |
{$ .LSQ $} |
| RSQ |
’ |
’ |
{$ .RSQ $} |
| EM |
— |
— |
{$ .EM $} |
| EN |
– |
– |
{$ .EN $} |
For more about these and other special characters see Peter K. Sheerin's article The Trouble With Em ’n EN.
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Telepark, a CityDesk VAR in Germany, has released a free utility that sends email notifications to subscribers when a CityDesk site changes.
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CityDesk Service Pack 2 is here!
The Fog Creek team fixed some minor, yet potentially painful, bugs in SP2. Upgrading is free.
What's New In Service Pack 2?
For download instructions and to check what version you have, run CityDesk and choose Help >> Check For Updates.
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New York Times recommends CityDesk, among other blogging tools.
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Darren Collins has an excellent description of how to use the full-powered article editor to edit snippets that you use everywhere like variables:
"I hit upon the idea of putting my content fragments into dummy articles. This would give me the ability to edit them in both HTML View and Normal View, and I could include them in other pages with a snippet of CityScript..."
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writes: "I have never entered and then lost a post, and I've posted upwards of 600 entries since I started using CityDesk last December....I have never used a commercial package more reliable [than] CityDesk."
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Jakob Nielsen welcomes CityDesk: "As I have said many times, Much of the true value of the Web comes from targeted, specialized sites. Small sites can't afford monster CMS products, so a good low-end system is highly welcome."
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David Walker writes in his review of CityDesk in the Sydney Morning Herald: "Countless managers of small to medium sites have wondered how to cross the chasm from hand-built pages to a true content management system. Now a product called CityDesk provides the best answer yet."
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Director of Nursing - Surgical Services
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