This is a Sunday Site by paulcapewell.

Hello world!

This site has been composed in... SeaMonkey Composer!

screenshot of SeaMonkey Composer

This is just a quick way for me to test out some features of this WYSIWYG web editor. It's the first I've tried in about twenty years.

Already I've had to Google how to a) set the width of the page and b) then re-centre the body text (which I had previously centred using the text formatting buttons.

One thing I do like is that clicking between the 'Normal' button (which shows the webpage editor, ala a word processor) and the 'Preview' button (which shows the web page as it would be viewed in a browser) NOTHING CHANGES.

Screenshot of SeaMonkey Composer toolbar

What you see really is what you get.

So, why am I doing this?

I've followed the Sunday Sites...movement?...for a while now. It's a sort of club where people get together (online) and make simple (or not-so-simple) websites around a particular theme. This could be a particular HTML tag, an idea for a website in general, or whatever really.

This week's theme is.... Well, I'll let John of Sunday Sites explain:

The seventeenth session is happening this Sunday, and this time we're going to do something unusual. The first time I came in contact with website building was in the late nineties, when my dad showed me how he made his website using a WYSIWYG editor called Netscape Composer. I’ve recently thought about how much of an impact those kinds of editors must have had on how many of the early ”amateur” websites looked and behaved, and I think it would be a fun challenge to try to make something with a very basic WYSIWYG editor like that. I suggest trying Seamonkey Composer, or doing as I did a couple of months ago – installing good old Netscape Composer on a virtual machine running Windows XP. A really old version of Dreamweaver would also work, but nothing too fancy! It’s alright if you edit the HTML after a while, but try to make as much of the site using only the graphic interface.

So, you see, I have downloaded SeaMonkey to try out the WYSIWYG composer. Despite the problems I had trying to install it on my Chromebook via Linux, it runs nicely on my Windows 10 machine. It's a delightfully esoteric piece of software, feeling as though it is from the past, but actually being bang up to date (at least according to the release notes).

I'm, uh, doing this on my own - ahead of the 7pm Sunday evening Gather chat. This is for a few reasons.

First, I've not actually attended any of the Sunday Sites meetings yet.

Secondly, I wanted to try and at least get SeaMonkey installed first before I even try. (Which, it turns out, was a good idea as I had issues getting it working on my Chromebook.)

And third I... kinda don't have a site in mind for this. It's a very meta-unmeta creation of simply trying the tool out and making a page whilst doing that. Which... looks like what John intended for the meeting in his introductory text above, so maybe that's okay?

So this has basically just been me noodling with SeaMonkey Composer for an hour or so, then uploading the file to Glitch to give it a home on the web.

I'm going to wrap things up and then send the link to the Sunday Sites people and then see if one day I might actually join the chat thing for real...

Okay... So what have I learned?