I have discovered time travel

For much of the last few weeks I've been in 1996.

I remember it well, for 'twas thenabouts that I was briefly and accidentally an AOL member. I suspect their CD fell through my letter box and I got carried away.

My chief memories are: it taking forever to download new artwork whenever I logged on; their abortion of a browser that couldn't recognise frames, tables, size tags etc in basic HTML; and their utterly rubbish FTP software that could upload one file at a time. For which, if memory serves, you had to enter, manually, the name of the remote destination file and then the name of the local file you were uploading.

Even by the standards of 1996, it was rubbish.

So I was quite surprised to start playing with our new content management system at work in 2007 and find it strangely reminiscent. It's an open source, browser based thing and professionalism prevents me from naming the company responsible but strewth, how the stupid drongoes look themselves in the mirror is beyond me. In this era of drag'n'drop, point'n'click mass selection and transfer of files I do not expect to have to upload files one at a time. And type in their names manually. I find it absurd that to edit a file I have to right click an option from a menu and then click a button and then click an icon. And if I'm stupid enough to look at another file too, forget it, my changes to the first one are gone. Unless I've clicked publish.

Perhaps most baffling of all is that you get two HTML views. Raw HTML, i.e. what you actually code in, and what can best be described as prettified HTML - it looks like HTML code until it starts formatting itself. Guess which of these two is the most obvious, and which is obscurely hidden behind another icon and drop-down menu.

The techies who designed this have the same attitude to users as I have to fairies. I've heard of them but I've never met one and I don't really believe they exist.

Time taken is the worst thing. Until recently, when I clicked publish, the IE or Firefox logo would start to turn as the browser did its stuff ... and stop. It may start again, it may not. You have no way of knowing. The system appears to have crashed, or, it may just be thinking. This can last (literally) for a couple of minutes. I have gone off to make a cup of tea and come back to find it still thinking about it. It may finally decide to save your work, in which case it suddenly springs back to life, or it may crash for good. Again, you simply cannot tell, without calling up the Task Manager. What you can't do during this time is anything else on the computer - read e-mail, work on a document - because that guarantees it *will* crash. I sent my manager a ranting email in which I generously estimated each document averaged at 30 seconds to save. I had put up c. 300 pages that week (we're doing a big web redesign), so that works out at 2.5 hours during in which I was unable to do anything other than stare at the screen and twiddle my thumbs. That's ignoring all the times the system fell over and I had to start again from scratch. And many files took considerably more than 1 minute.

This has improved slightly since I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox. The improvement is that it no longer hangs about for a couple of minutes before crashing, it simply vanishes from your screen.

There is, I have a found, a way round this. Go to the raw HTML view, and code it manually. Yes, manually. I'm actually quite good at this as before I learnt Dreamweaver two years ago all my HTML coding was done manually. Children, I can remember coding for the company website using nothing more sophisticated than Windows Notepad. My productivity has soared.

1996 is a fun place to be. My first novel's been accepted by a publisher and we're due a general election next year. Be interesting to see how it turns out.