2007-12-23

.Mac and iWeb

I've written before about .Mac and iWeb. Back in the days of the free service known as iTools I was a happy user and when it went to a paid service I subscribed for a year. After that year first year I unsubscribed because I felt I was not using the features it offered... it did not fit my needs. As a free service it didn't matter that I didn't use the features but once I started paying I wanted a better match and better performance. Since then I have made it a habit of evaluating it once a year just to be up-to-date on the current features and performance. In the few years since my paid subscription I've never seen anything that would prompt me to subscribe again or recommend it to family or friends. Until now.

This past February I started taking more pictures when I purchased a new DSLR and I started thinking of finding an alternative to flickr. I love flickr but as a dial-up user I don't always have the time to comment on photos and really that seems to be a central focus of the site... it is a community for sharing photos and commenting. The other problem is that free accounts are limited to 200 photos. Thinking I would cancel my account there I cobbled together a system using iWeb and Galerie to host a couple of personal pages and a place for images here on my MacProductive server. It worked but it was never really convenient and as a result I've continued to post images to flickr and failed to keep my own pages updated. After a few weeks evaluating the new version of iWeb in combination with the recent upgrades to .Mac I've decided it is time to move back. Initially I'll just be moving my images and personal blog there but I may also end up hosting MacProductive there if I can work a way for the two sites to co-exist with domain forwarding and/or the new .Mac personal domain feature.

Using iWeb 2 with the new .Mac has been a pleasure. What has impressed me is that even on dial-up it has been very stable for me. While changing pages and adding images is not super speedy I have yet to have any errors. iWeb just steadily chugs through the process. By comparison when posting to this blog with RapidWeaver I often have to make several attempts due to errors. I'm still not totally happy with the way iWeb compresses images though the larger files are worth dealing with because of the convenience. Making new image albums in iWeb or adding to existing ones from my Aperture library is simple drag and drop. I'm hoping that the next version of Aperture will gain the same integration that iPhoto has with the new .Mac image galleries which look fantastic and are even better than those in iWeb. Until then though I am very happy with what iWeb offers.

If you are looking for an easy way to build a site and/or host images take a look at iLife 08 and .Mac if you have not already. I ordered my .Mac via Amazon because it is a bit cheaper that way, around $70 rather than Apple's $100.

So, come over for a visit and poke around for a bit. There are lots of images and my little blog: A hermit speaks. Feel free to leave comments on any image or blog entry.

I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

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