A personal story
I created and administer my website using a program called Rapidweaver. It’s a low-cost alternative to Dreamweaver on the Mac; at least, it starts at a low-cost. The application itself retails for $79, and it does a lot of what you need it to do. And then it doesn’t do what you need it to do, as its simplicity makes it rather limited in its scope. You need to purchase plug-ins to do everything else, as well as additional themes.
Of course, the Rapidweaver plug-ins require a serial number to activate and use. I reimaged my Mac a few weeks ago, and loaded up Rapidweaver to make some changes to my website. To make all the appropriate changes, in fact to actually load my local copy of the website, I have to load all the plugins that are associated with it (in this case Sitemap, RWMultitool and Stacks, as well as the theme). Wouldn’t you know it; I don’t have the serial for Stacks. It was in an email that I didn’t get around to archiving before I killed. That is my fault, I get that. But should the software’s creator attempt to help me with his activation scheme? Yes, I think so. The Stacks website mentions to contact support if you have misplaced a serial, so I emailed the support for Stacks, and a few hours after that, I tweeted the creator asking for help. A few hours after that, he tweets me back stating that he would get to my email in the order it was received. That was 2 days ago.
Two days. That’s 2 days that I haven’t been able to update my website, to pull some information that I no longer want up there, to add some new information about my business offerings, to do general maintenance. That’s entirely too long. Sure, I could remove all the Stacks code from the site, and will have to do that today, but it requires redoing up to 10 pages of the site.
It’s time to learn to code on my own. I don’t want to have to rely on a program to do all the work for me, especially if I have to rely on the programs (non-willing, or slow) support to allow me to use the program. And it needs to be open platform, none of this Mac-only/pc-only nonsense. Good thing I have the time…