A column of sequels

Half the fun of writing a column like this is managing the fallout after it appears every Monday.

The first responses land in my mailbox almost the moment the story goes up. Late in the day I send out a notification to about 500 regular readers, which triggers even more responses. By the time this site’s weekly newsletter broadcasts on Wednesday, I have a pretty good idea if I made a connection – or short-circuited.

Needless to say, I don’t always get the reaction I expect.

For example, a couple of weeks ago a lot of folks blew their fuses when I wrote about the dangers of in-flight radiation. A gang of angry engineers and Ph.D.-types flamed me after I failed to make the distinction between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. They didn’t like the follow-up column any better, mea culpa and all. But I think the propellerheads missed my point, which is that we don’t know enough about radiation levels on aircraft.

Reader Neil Robin wrote with a fitting postscript to the radiation issue. He says about five years ago he took a counter on a commercial flight to measure the amount of ionizing radiation.

“At near sea level,” he remembers, “I would average about 12 counts per minute. This is considered normal. At 35,000 feet it was about 350 counts per minute average, nearly 30 times higher. I still fly all the time but I keep in mind that I’m getting about 30 times the dosage while in the air over what I get on the ground.”

Another column about the frustrations of trying to publish a Web site remotely drew a firestorm of electronic messages from users. Most of them went something like this: “Try Dreamweaver!”

So I did. I secured a copy of the software from Macromedia and tested it. And guess what? The e-mails were right – Dreamweaver is nothing short of fantastic. Compared with the beta of Microsoft FrontPage 2000, which ate my hard drive for lunch, and Drumbeat 2000, which required the direct intervention of its public relations department so that I wouldn’t personally dismantle my computer in a fit of frustration, Dreamweaver was, well, a dream.

I spoke with professional Web designer George Cashman of Creativelinkpartners.com in Rolling Hills Estates, Calif., about the program. He’s used it to publish pages from a hotel, a client’s office, or “anywhere there’s a phone line.”

One of my biggest complaints with my top pick during my last review of Web publishing software was that it took up so much memory that the program essentially had to run on a desktop.

“What’s your experience been?” I asked him.

“Well, we usually have three programs running at the same time on our laptops: Dreamweaver, Fireworks – which is another Macromedia program – and Photoshop,” he said.

“And?”

“Sometimes we run out of memory and have to close one of the windows down. But it doesn’t happen that often,” Cashman said.

I include this snippet of dialogue because Drumbeat is so top-heavy that you don’t want to try to run anything else – if you’re brave enough to try it on your notebook.

Remote users will also like Dreamweaver’s drag-and-drop File Transfer Protocol functions and the way the program handles code. Don’t like something in WYSIWYG? Then toggle over to the HTML window and make a change there. It’s that easy.

Following up on other columns is not as straightforward. A few months ago I wrote about remote backup systems and promised to revisit the issue soon. I figured it would give me the time to road-test the products to see if they were any good.

But there were two problems. First, I don’t travel enough to take advantage of such a system. In fact, I travel as infrequently as possible (which I suppose is quite a confession for a columnist who writes about travel). And second, I lack the patience and the expense account to wait anywhere from 15 minutes to half an hour for my files to back up on the Internet.

My files are easily backed up on a floppy disk. Power users could even cram it all onto a Zip drive instead of trying to get on the ‘Net.

Is remote backup much ado about nothing? No, that’s not what I’m suggesting. For some users, particularly those on a corporate Intranet or local area network, I think these systems have a legitimate function. But judging by the lackluster response I got to my first column on this issue, I’d say the floppies have the upper hand in the backup debate.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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