New look, (mostly) old content
iWeb: not just for blogging anymore
You may have noticed a couple of changes around this site…
Now that I have my data all sorted out, I went to go upgrade to the new version of RapidWeaver (I’ve been running v3.2.1, and the new v3.5 is out). Well, they made a number of changes to the guts of themes, and my custom theme needed changing. In theory, the changes aren’t too drastic, but since I did a fair amount of work on the theme to work around old problems, there’s a lot of tweaks (and new coding) to make all over again that will require quite a bit of effort to change and test.
In the meantime, I’ve been playing around with Apple’s iLife ‘06 suite of applications. I played around a bit with iWeb as well. When iWeb first came out, it was interesting, but it seemed kinda useless for more than a couple of pages. The site it created was enormous, and very slow to load. However, going from v1.0 to v1.1 made a big difference. Now, the site size is much more manageable, and it seemed like it might be possible to use it for this site.
I then spent a few hours “porting” the RapidWeaver version of the site to iWeb to see if it was even something I’d like. The pages you are seeing right now are the end result – I decided to switch over from RapidWeaver to iWeb.
There are some limitations that iWeb has that RapidWeaver does not:
- Cannot insert arbitrary HTML or JavaScript into a page. For me, the biggest problem with that was table creation. Neither RapidWeaver nor iWeb have support for tables, but at least I could add the table HTML into RapidWeaver. With iWeb, the best I can do is create a table using tabs, and then it will rasterize the table on export.
- Cannot change “themes” of existing pages. The only work-around seems to be to create a new page, and then laboriously cut-and-paste the content to the new page. Not a big deal for most pages, but blogs are a major pain to port.
- Publishing the site to a non .Mac account (as I do) requires a full export of the site, and there is no built-in incremental update to the web site. I have to manually upload what has changed, and that is error prone. Well, that, or a complete re-upload. At 100MB, that’s not a pleasant option. There are some sync options (like using Captain FTP), so I’ll investigate that.
However, there are some benefits I rather like:
- Incredible flexibility in placing content. Text, images, movies, etc. can be placed anywhere on a page. Any font can be used, and if it’s not a “web” font, then it is rasterized on export. This allows incredible flexibility. For example, my Photos page was not generated from a template. I just had the idea of making “mini-banners”, and placed the images and text by dragging them around. Piece of cake.
- Creating banners, cropping, etc. is trivial.
- Inserting objects into text boxes with flow-around text is simple, and works as expected.
- The blog pages and archive management is more to my liking (however, RapidWeaver’s blog module is quite nice too).
The actual port didn’t take all that long. I’d say about 12 hours of effort, and 80% of that was moving over the old blog (lots of cutting and pasting – but I also added illustrations to most of the blog entries that were not there before). My estimate is that it took less time to redesign, move content, and publish the site than it would have to tweak the RapidWeaver theme.
In the end, I was pretty pleased with the switch. Also, when it really comes down to it, this website is something I do “for fun” (I have an odd definition of “fun” sometimes). So, I may eventually move back to RapidWeaver, or stick with iWeb, or do something else completely. Who knows… At least for now, this is what I’m up to.