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I forgot to mention that Macromedia has announced a new product: Contribute, a lightweight and extremely user-friendly tool for editing web pages.

Before I go any further, I should note that I work for Macromedia, and though Contribute isn't my main project, I did help out with the docs for it, so I'm far from unbiased. On the other hand, I started out pretty skeptical about this tool, but became a convert; I think it's really cool.

The idea is that in a lot of contexts, there are web professionals who are the only ones qualified to make changes to a site's pages, so anyone else who wants to contribute to those pages has to go through the web pro. If the department's administrative assistant wants to correct a word's spelling on the department's intranet page, or if a member of the department wants to update their contact info or add a page of meeting notes, they may have to get the attention of the webmaster and wait for them to make the changes. Meanwhile, the webmaster is deluged with such requests; hundreds of tiny little changes, each of which takes a little time to make, each of which takes away time from more important tasks.

So Contribute makes it easy for anyone with basic computer skills to edit pages on a site, while letting the web pros retain a certain amount of control over things like formatting and styles. Contribute is sort of like a cross between a web browser and a word processor: a Contribute user browses to the page they want to edit, clicks the Edit button, makes changes, then clicks the Publish button. Old versions are saved on the server in case someone make a mistake and want to "roll back" to a previous version. MS Word and MS Excel documents can be dragged onto a page and automatically converted to HTML.

Unfortunately, Contribute works only in Windows at the moment, but there'll be a Mac version in 2003.

The Windows version will be officially released in December; in the meantime, you can download a free "technology preview" version to try it out, with the understanding that it's not necessarily release-quality yet.

The price of the released version will be $99. That seems steep to me, because I'm thinking in terms of all the individuals I know who could make use of this—we could use half a dozen copies for the magazine, for instance. But I gather that for corporate intranets and for freelance web designers who design sites for clients, that price is quite good.

There's a Contribute infomercial done in Flash on the Macromedia site (it's about a megabyte, so not so good on a slow connection) that shows more details; check it out if you're interested. The thing that I think is coolest about that infomercial, btw, has nothing to do with Contribute: it's that there's a Closed Captioning button you can press that will bring up a two-line text display of the words being spoken. A very nice and much-needed addition to Flash, with a nice interface.