Nvu is Dead, Kind of

Nvu may be dead but folks keep moving the body. We haven’t heard much from Nvu since the original release. There was a report of a Nvu 1.1 in a Freespire release but since I’m on XP I can’t verify that claim. I haven’t otherwise found anything to indicate progress beyond Nvu 1.0.

There was a pleading on the Nvu site regarding continuation of the site. Nvu has both a dot org and a dot com address and I believe it was on Nvu.com that I saw the notice. A nice gent by the name of Kevin said that he owned the domaine and didn’t want the site to go dark. He said he moved it after contacting Linspire, sponsor of the Nvu development effort, and receiving no reply.

Since there was no expression of ownership by Linspire, Kevin also added a link recommending that folks get KompoZer. KompoZer is not only a bug fix for Nvu but is improving the function and user interface of the WYSIWYG HTML editor. I thought that right nice of Kevin as there is really no sense in downloading Nvu at this point. I also took it as a pretty good indication that, if the guy who owns Nvu dot something had given up, Nvu was really dead.

This "new" site was picked up on the KompoZer support forum referenced by Kevin. When that happened Kevin's comments, the forum link and his reference to KompoZer quickly went away. The post on the forum appeared Sept 18 and the site is back to original form today, Sept 23. The whole episode must be an embarrassment. As I have said, once something hits the Internet it is part of history. I’m sure someone somewhere has a screenshot.

Maintain Your Links

One of the things any good web author (or web site owner) must do is verify links referenced by the site. Links are a service to your visitors but a busted link is a great disservice. I have some quick links to download KompoZer and find the user manual on each page as part of my blog template. While validating the user manual address I noticed Kevin’s letter and doing the same today I noticed the manual address no longer worked. As before that led me back to the Nvu.com and Nvu.org home pages which are back to their original form.

Most web sites have too many links to check manually so using a computer tool to do it makes a lot of sense. The checker at W3C, for example, is one way to check all the links on your site. The checker works for conventional sites but has trouble with this blog. Checking the checker does not find links to old blog articles. I’ll update the link to Mr. Cooke’s User Guide manually.

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