Well, I went ahead and created a Google AdWords campaign for Less Than Slash, just to test the water. So if you search for "XHTML" on Google (among a few other key phrases), you will see an ad for Less Than Slash.
There isn't a link to the appropriate search in this article because each click actually costs money - between $0.05 and $0.10. There is a cap, so only so many clicks can happen per day before the ad shuts off. This should work out alright because Google reports how many clicks they expect you to get per day, and this number times the cost per click is below my daily budget. So anyway, if you go there, just look at the pretty ad, but don't click on it, since you already know where to go to get LTS.
Speaking of that, I have recently moved all of the current Less Than Slash stuff to a new domain. It's www.lessthanslash.info. Note that the top-level domain is ".info" and not ".com". Some dude in California is just sitting on the ".com", ".net", and ".org" domains and doing nothing with them. Fortunately, this does not prevent me from releasing free software under that name in the .info space. It should work just the same as everything else.
I think my goal for this project will be to have someone adopt LTS as their official XHTML editor. If this happens (even if they switch after a week), I will have met my goal. Hopefully, the Google AdWords campaign will get the information out there.
As such, work continues on making LTS a comprehensive XHTML editor. I've done some work with the autocomplete so that it won't completely annoy anyone who isn't used to working with it. One thing that I will have to adjust for is people (like Mom) who put spaces between their attribute names, the equals sign, and the attribute value (Like this: <img src[space here]=[space here]"somthing">). I don't do this, and the autocomplete functions of LTS reflect that. But I'm trying to see each person's individual usage and accomodate it, so I'll have to account for that.
I have already added a feature that people unfamiliar with autocomplete may find handy. If you cancel the autocomplete box a few times, LTS will ask you if you want to keep using it at all. Then you don't have to ignore it all the time. I thought that was pretty neat. There are a couple of other options in there that will let you insert a DTD declaration, just in case you didn't realize that one was required to make autocomplete work.
I added the ability to create a new image directly from the clipboard contents. This is handy because you can right-click on an image in IE, choose "Copy", then click New Image From Clipboard in LTS, and POOF! You can edit that image. So if you find clipart on the web, you don't have to save it to disk before you crop and resample it. Neato.
I fixed some stuff that broke when I added link file support to the preview. Before I added link file support, the preview wouldn't use the images/scripts/stylesheets that you specified in your file. Now when you preview, the linked files are copied to the temp directory along with your edited file, so everything displays properly.
Anyway, when I added support for linked files, I broke the title capture and style autocomplete. It's a long story, but basically I have to run the tag parser twice to catch everything. Once for the links and once for the tags, both of which take mere milliseconds. It's silly, but it works now.
The F1 help continues to be broken, and I'm not sure why. For whatever reason, the F1 key is no longer captured by the application where it used to be. This change happened when I switched compiling of LTS (and all of the associated Delphi modules) to the new computer. This conversion to the new system has been a pain in the butt.
I also changed the image engine from the vector-capable one back to the non-vector-capable one. No one besides me will notice this, but it's significant because it means that I've resigned myself from trying to get ImageEnVect to do paint-program features, and will more likely develop my own layer and vector-based image-editing engine for use in LTS. Something like a modernized version of Fractal Design's Expression program.
Hey, neat! Apparently someone has bought and updated Expression. Cool! Of course, my rendition of this for LTS will be nowhere near as powerful. Wow, Expression 3 is really, really neat. (Actually, the only reason I didn't run the old version was because it wouldn't run under Win98.)
Ok, that's it for the LTS update for now. I'm off to download the demo version of Expression 3...
