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icruise · 11:08 AM

I've been trying to start a blog recently, but I've had a lot of trouble finding an application that suits my needs. It might be because I'm being somewhat ambitions and want something that will give me most of the features that I've come to like as a reader of other people's blogs. These include comments and full RSS feeds. I've tried iBlog, RapidWeaver, and iWeb. I like a lot of iWeb's features, but there are some problems that are probably going to make me go back to iBlog.

I had a little trouble grasping how the blogging aspect of iWeb was supposed to work at first, but after playing with it for a while I think I have the hang of it. With the recent update to 1.1, they've added a very nice implementation of commenting that doesn't rely on any external service like Haloscan.com. And while it took a lot of fiddling, the page I made looks quite good overall, although I'm not really happy with the main index. Here is the iWeb version of my blog. And here is the iBlog version.

Now for the problems. The biggest one for me personally is that it doesn't give you an option to use a different iDisk from the one you have registered in the .Mac preferences. In my case, I have a .Mac family pack. The main user is in my real name, and I don't want to use that for blogging, so I use one of the family pack members as an anonymous account. At the moment, the only way I can really use iWeb with this account is to set up a new user account on my Mac and switch over to it when I want to use iWeb. But that's a pretty kludgy workaround.

Some other problems with iWeb are that the index page isn't very smart about the way it displays the article abstracts. They often just stop in the middle of a sentence without even an ellipsis to indicate that there is more to read. And the RSS feed is similar, plus the graphics don't seem to load properly in NetNewsWire half the time. Finally, there is no support for categorizing posts.

Is anyone else using iWeb for a blog?

icruise · May 16, 2006, 10:38 AM

One other thing that I just remembered is that, unless I'm misunderstanding something, there's no way to make a change to the design of your site and have it automatically reflected on all of your blog pages. With iBlog, I could tweak the design of the site, or even change it drastically and all of the pages would be updated.

icruise · May 17, 2006, 01:40 AM

So nobody uses iWeb for blogging? I think I'm going to have to go back to iBlog. Despite some quirks and bugs, it seems to be the best all-around solution. Maybe the next few revisions of iWeb will make it better for me, but the problems I detail above are sort of deal-breakers at the moment.

midwinter · May 17, 2006, 02:52 AM

I would imagine that features of the blogs you're used to reading are because they're run by Wordpress or Moveable Type or Typepad. WP is very, very nice, and while it lacks many of the features of MT, it's really quite nice.

icruise · May 17, 2006, 05:10 AM

I looked into Wordpress and the others, but they seemed a bit more than I really wanted to get into. And while some of them (like Wordpress) also have simplified hosted versions where you can basically just sign up and start blogging, they really suffer in terms of customizability.

The thing is that all of the programs I tried support the features I want in theory. But the execution leaves something to be desired.

Seattle · May 17, 2006, 05:51 AM

"Is anyone else using iWeb for a blog?"

I am. I have a blog about my new son and it is easy and works for me. How did you add commenting? It that only with a .Mac account? I host my own site and do not have a .Mac account.

Here is a link to my blog.

http://www.puppybark.com/Site/Blog/Blog.html

I like both versions of your blogs. Nice work.

icruise · May 17, 2006, 06:34 AM

Yes, commenting and a few other features only work with .Mac, unfortunately. You might be able to use something like iComment to add it to your blog though. I think iWeb is perfect for a site like yours, that isn't going to have multiple daily updates.

midwinter · May 19, 2006, 08:00 AM

Originally Posted by Icruise

I looked into Wordpress and the others, but they seemed a bit more than I really wanted to get into. And while some of them (like Wordpress) also have simplified hosted versions where you can basically just sign up and start blogging, they really suffer in terms of customizability.

The thing is that all of the programs I tried support the features I want in theory. But the execution leaves something to be desired.

I'm not sure I understand. If you sign up for a blogger account, for instance, you can edit/customize the thing to your heart's content.... There are loads of templates, or, if you're so inclined, you can edit the HTML by hand. There are really only a few tags that make the thing go. Same goes for Wordpress or MT or whatever.

I'm just not sure I get the blogging aspect of iWeb. It looks to be a neat little wysiwyg html application, but it lacks EVERYTHING that makes a good blogging application.

icruise · May 19, 2006, 09:14 AM

I haven't tried blogger specifically, but I did look at several services and sign up for a hosted Wordpress account. You can't edit the templates at all, as far as I can tell (and there were people in the forums requesting that it be added as a feature, so I don't think I just missed it). Of course if you want to host Wordpress yourself, you can configure it extensively, but that was more than I wanted to do.

I didn't want to have to pay anything, since I already have the .Mac account and would like to make use of it. Of course the big advantage of things like blogspot are that you can use them from any computer.

midwinter · May 19, 2006, 10:13 AM

It sounds to me like what you want is a blogger account. No categories, but it does comments and allows for any kind of customization you want.