Hamster's Wheel: ProsePoint

Tuesday, 19 January 2010

ProsePoint

Okay! So nobody got back to me, on here or Facebook, to say they have used, or know someone else who has used, ProsePoint, so today I thought that I would just go ahead and load it onto my laptop and give it a go myself. I did that okay, it took about 30 seconds (which I thought was a bit quick). Now I can actually open it to get it to work.
It comes up with an option to Open or Save. I click Open (as I've already saved it to my Desktop) and nothing happens at all.
It's times like this that I need a man about the house. Someone who is a computer genius would help! I am getting really frustrated and so am going to just give up (in case I end up punching another hole in my keyboard!).
Any help that anyone out there can provide would be much appreciated.

6 comments:

badabing said...: Hello m'deario ! The download is a .tar file which needs to be unpacked. I unpacked it with a free program called WinRAR - get it from www.rarlab.com. From the website it looks a teeny bit complicated for a novice to install and the requirements section of the website says you also need to have installed a web server, a database app., PHP and something called Drupal, which is some sort of auto web publishing thing.; 8:13 pm
Alex said...: Cheers for that, never seen a .tar file before, so didn't know what to do with it (my computer has trouble even finding it!).
I will give it all a go when I have more time. I could have sworn that, when I read it, it said all you needed was Internet Explorer!
Drupal is the company that ProsePrint are associated with, so I guess, it is far from a "free" service as they advertise it.
We shall see.
Thanks again anyway.
A; 10:39 pm
hyfryd said...: Hi Alex. Long-time reader, first time commenter. The ProsePoint software is a CMS you need to install on a web server on the internet (with a hosting company). That's pretty complicated in itself, although once it's there the site is all administered via the web (like Blogger and other blog software).

Keeping it up-to-date and secure would also be a full time job, even for a professional techie, so I wouldn't recommend it.

It sounds like you could just use a blog to do what you want, but may need more flexibility than Blogger can offer.

Maybe you should try the free blog hosting service from WordPress. Just play around with it, see how you can best use pages, tags, categories and other features.

You can create some impressive magazine-style websites in WP although there is a bit of a learning curve. Give it a go and I'd be interested to see what you can do! Cheers.; 7:33 pm
Alex said...: Hey Hyfryd, good to hear from you. I had come to the conclusion that ProsePoint was not, in fact, the right tool for me. Am looking into alternatives, and as much as I had hoped to get my idea started for February (LGBT History Month in the UK) it is just NOT going to happen now.
I will have another look at WordPress, though I wasn't particularly impressed when I tried to use it before (to be honest it used too much jargen for me to understand all the applications that it had). Who knows, maybe I'll get it to work, though I really wanted to create something in a newspaper/magazine format.
I really do appreciate your input though, cheers.
Alex; 8:04 pm
badabing said...: Do you have an example of the sort of thing you want to produce ?; 9:31 am
Alex said...: I've not really seen what I want to produce on the 'net.

I want it to look like a newspaper, with headlines of different sizes (so I could distinguish the main story etc), multiple columns (of different widths / lengths, pictures, possibly with YouTube-type / audio clips.
Possibly, if you click on an article headline, you could get the article on its own (in case the reader just wants to print off the one story).
The capability to view it from all media (i.e. including Blackberrys, would that involve PDF formats?), and to print it off like a real magazine if the reader wants.
And, if it takes off, advertising.

So you know of a product that would do all this for me for minimal outlay?; 3:44 pm