Friday - April 10, 2009

Pending Move

A long, long time ago (I can still remember how the music used to make me smile) I started building my first web pages on a dial-up ISP called Delphi.  

They -- eventually -- vanished and my account was converted to Mindspring.com, who were eaten by Earthlink.  

Apple introduced iDisk -- essentially webDav integrated into MacOSX -- making content hosting trivial.  

I converted my content from hand-built HTML pages to Cheetah templates.   Worked great.  All the pages have a consistent look and feel, I edit only the content, everything else handles itself.

Fancy Editors

Then, it got ugly.  Apple introduced iBlog (which became a 3rd party product, and now seems to have no support at all.)  iBlog was a GUI editor for blog entries.

Apple also introduced Homepage .Mac web site with a web-based GUI editor for my web pages.  I made limited use of this because it published photo album pages out of iPhoto really nicely.

Ordinarily, I suggest that GUI editors, drag-and-drop, and the like are not the best way to manipulate text.  But, there they were (and still are) on my desktop.  And they had correct (CSS's) and clever JavaScript that I really didn't have the patience to write myself.

The Future

Apple's turning off the Homepage .Mac web editor.  Turns out that I rarely use it.  My "home page" is done with their editor -- but I haven't made a change to it in years.  

There are just 8 links on that page.  I should be able to migrate the little bit of homepage-based stuff without busting a blood vessel.

But this blog is a real brain-cramper.

- Move to web-based blogging?  Get out of the one vendor trap?

- Pick another desktop blogging tool?  Almost a year ago to the day, I wrung my hands over this and resolved to do nothing.  Try again and see what this years models are like?

- Stick with iBlog?  It has a few problems, but it works.

- Switch to iWeb?  How hard can it be to migrate this page template to iWeb?

- Roll my own replacing Cheetah with Sphinx?  (Current loving Sphinx -- it has a "rebuild the content" that incorporates make-like minimal rebuild.)

Sigh.  

Author: Steven Lott
Technorati Tags: iBlog MacOSX Blog
Technorati Cosmos:
Technorati Watchlist:
Add this entry to: