Reading more discussions on the business of Joel has got me thinking about the problem of marketing GeekWeaver.

So here’s the pitch … in the classic 5 points of selling 😉

1) The pain you didn’t know you had!
Oh, the horror, the horror, too many tags too many files, you have to reach for the mouse and click to find the file menu and open up a new file and then scroll around in that silly little common dialog where the files are all represented by little yellow blobs that are 2mm square and then you click one and open and your hand has to come off the mouse and down to the keyboard and you try to scroll around but there are tags and tags and tags then you change something and you forget to close the tag and everything’s position gets screwed up and you think … oh if only I’d used CSS, but there wasn’t time and anyway you have twenty pages the graphic designer made by copying and pasting in Dreamweaver (oh BAD Dreamweaver) and now the client wants them all changed and if you were working with a content management system you’d have put some common things into includable subtemplates but you don’t have that and you think why am I watching the grains of sand draining through the hourglass of my life doing the same mechanical transformations on dozens of static html and xml files and you know the customer will only want them changed again next week …. aaaaiiiighhh why can’t html be like a proper programming language instead of this ???? WHY GOD? WHY??
2) The generic solution.
Yes, a programming language. That would have the requisite controls over abstraction that I need. And a decent IDE. If only writing HTML files could be more like a programming lanaguage.
3) Our solution is your solution.
Fear not because GeekWeaver will solve all your problems.
All your pages are kept in one file, which you can navigate around with the keyboard in the comfort of your favourite OPML editor. You never have to close an HTML or XML tag again with the . notation that takes advantage of the outline structure to know what blocks are meant to be inside what blocks. Never, ever copy and paste when you can define your own re-usable, parameterizable blocks at any level you like including outside the level of a single page … that’s right folks, you can define a reusable component which actually evaluates to a number of pages or other output files.
4) Accept the price
Think … just think … of the hours of your time that could be saved if your static web-pages (and everyone has a few tucked away somewhere – remember that old departmental intranet-site no-one’s been updating in years? Remember that customer who needed to access the documentation off-line?) were all safely in GeekWeaver format? How much would that be worth? (And at 50 quid an hour you’re underselling yourself, but hours of tranquility can be bought for a mere … well, let’s see download and install Python 10 mins on Windows, probably already have it on Linux and Mac. OPML editor? 5 mins on broadband. GeekWeaver … 2 mins?
5) Act now!
Get it today! because it’s Saturday and you know you’ll be too busy wasting time manually editing HTML once Monday comes around. And if you’re an early adopter, and send me emails, then I’m more likely to listen to your requests and stuff …