Hello and questions!

[iainmacb]

First of all, just signed up, looks like a very helpful website!

I have a series of questions and would love any advice anyone can offer, along with links to tutorials or the likes if available.

My friends and I are attempting to set up a website which gathers certain information from other sites and pools it. I've been reading around and apparently this is what an aggregator does.
Could anyone recommend me an aggregator?
Wikipedia lists a good 30 or 40 different ones! I operate on a mac by the way.

Second, I helped build a couple of websites a few years ago. We used hmtl. I am aware that there are programmes like dreamweaver out there that pretty much do the groundwork. I played around with dreamweaver 5 or so years ago and while it worked well, the code always ended up being excessively complex and muddled up.
Is the current version of dreamweaver better?
Should I stick to html coding?
Are there any other similar programmes out there that might find the best of both worlds?

I'm pretty rusty on website dev, so will probably have myriad questions, but I'll get to them in due time!

I hope someone here can help, thanks very much in advance!

 

[CaldwellYSR]

I don't know anything about the first question but if you want good valid code you're pretty much going to have to write it. Dreamweaver has a design mode that will put out code for you but it's very ugly code that tends to break really easy. That being said Dreamweaver is still a good product for writing code if you A) have the money for it B) Can get it for cheap or C) just don't care about money. There are other programs that are just as good for writing code that are free. My favorite personally is Aptana Studio 3. It is completely free and has most of the same features as dreamweaver. The main difference is it doesn't have design view editor so you have to write all the code.

 

[mikeisflux]

I use dreamweaver CS5 as well as flash CS5. And it is very good if your doing alot of changes with CSS. I dont have any problems with it. Yeah sometimes i have to switch back to edit the code myself but it gives you a great representation on how it will look when live.

 

[CaldwellYSR]

I use dreamweaver CS5 as well as flash CS5. And it is very good if your doing alot of changes with CSS. I dont have any problems with it. Yeah sometimes i have to switch back to edit the code myself but it gives you a great representation on how it will look when live.

You get good html out of design view?

 

[Phreaddee]

cs5 is an improvement, but... yeah I still wouldnt rely on it...