Dan Bricklin writes on Trellix Web Express (TWE), which is a “a system that is private labeled by others to provide integrated authoring and web site hosting.” Trellix just added blogging support to their core web authoring platform. Bricklin explains how their platform works:
TWE is run on behalf of particular service providers (e.g., CNET). Once signed up as one of their customers/members, you can enter the TWE environment using your browser. TWE runs on servers, just like web-based email. It publishes web sites that are served by (or on behalf of) the same service providers. If those service providers license Trellix Blogging (we are not announcing who yet), then when you click on “Create a Web Site”, you are given the option of clicking on “Choose the weblog template”. You then choose a “design” (the look of the web site) or accept the one proposed. You are then presented with an editing page, with the home page of the new, unpublished web site showing. At various places on the page there are “Edit” buttons next to template text and images, and there is a toolbar of other buttons like “Add Page”, “Add Text”, “Add Image”, etc., on the bottom. With a blog, there is one other button on the screen, right above your posts: “Post to blog”. To make your first post, you click on that button, type what you’d like to say into a text box, and then press “Done” or “Done and Publish”. That’s it. When looking at a page in the editor, you can always use the “Change Look” button to switch to a different canned look or to change background colors and images, add logos to each page, change default fonts, etc. The next time you want to add another post, you just log into the system, and press the “Post to blog” button next to the first page that comes up, type your post, and the press “Done and Publish”. All of this is pretty much as easy to use as web-based email.”
He adds: “Here we have a full-fledged web site creation tool, one that regular people can use to easily create customized multi-page web sites without any knowledge of HTML, that now has blogging built-in. Blogging (adding posts with date/time stamps, doing archives and permanent links, etc.) will now be as native to TWE as adding text or images to a web page. Or, viewed another way, here we have a blogging tool with web site creation built-in. If you want to add a page telling your readers who you are, or one with an essay to further make a point, you can. And you can do it without learning and setting up another tool.”
