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iWeb

More on Mac

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Pete visited yesterday and left a comment on “MacHeadache,” apparently in the wee hours of Tuesday morning (hard to tell, since iWeb has come unstuck in time…it no longer knows what time it really is). I started to respond to his, which only just appeared, in a comment of my own and then realized I was going on at enough length to create a new post.

Here’s what Pete observed:

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

My response:

Functionality! Pete, yours is the first comment that has posted in over a week. Yesterday, if you had hit the “Add Comments” link, you would have seen an ad for MobileMe

I downloaded all the most current software, for which I had to pay at a time that was WILDLY inconvenient for me. Even though the Apple store’s manager gave me a 50% discount (turns out that’s fairly common-others have had the same experience), it still put my budget, which had barely recovered from the staggering expense of caring for a dying pet, back in the red. Eventually I would have bought the most recent OS, but when I could afford it, not when Apple ordered me to.

Yes, I know DSL is slower than broadband. I can’t afford broadband. In these parts it’s expensive, and I work for a university…by definition that means you don’t earn much unless you’re a football coach, a full bull in business or engineering, or an upper-level administrator. The cheapest cell phone I could get from Qwest — which I subscribed to only because pay phones are a thing of the past and I have to commute on a freeway that takes me a long, long way from home and from the car mechanic — is a stretch for me. I miss having a phone bill that is not a stinging hit each month.

All the rest of my software is up-to-date. The package that includes iWeb, called iLife, is the 2008 edition. I have followed all of the instructions sent by Apple’s support team. My son, who is a great deal more techie than I am, has also tried to make the system work. So far, nothing has succeeded

That you were able to post a comment suggests some functionality may be returning. However, it remains true that iWeb, while it has some attractive features, doesn’t have the interesting features supported by WordPress. I should be able to enter a StumbleUpon button, I should be able to subscribe to Feedburner, I should be able to register with Technorati, I should be able to register with Google, I should be able to ping other blogs. None of these things appear to be possible with iWeb.

I started Funny about Money in iWeb because I had never done a blog before and I doubted much would come of this one. Apple touted its user-friendly simplicity, and it looked like a way to play at blogging without having to put out much effort. I was already paying for Mac.com, which provided an extra e-mail account and which alleged (wrongly, I’m now told) to provide off-site storage space for Quicken backups. Since I didn’t expect Funny would go anywhere, I figured it wasn’t worth the learning curve involved in developing a website on more serious blogging software.

Now I figure Funny does have the potential to draw readers, and it’s kind of taken on a proverbial life of its own. Had I known it could be even mildly successful, I would have started the blog in WordPress, following Jim’s very cogent advice at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

It’s way past time to move Funny to WordPress. It’s going to lose most of its archive, but frankly, little of that is worth storing for the electronic ages. I’ll migrate the key posts first and then the ones I think are the best I’ve done so far. With any luck, once I get the blog on the new platform it will be even better and will have more opportunities to find new readers.

LOL! Yes, computers are the opposite of simplicity and frugality! But they are a part of our daily life. Just as you can’t get by without a cell phone, you can’t live a fully engaged life in America (or the world) today without a computer system and an online connection. It’s just the way things are.

Update: Blog migration project

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Between you and me and the lamp-post, I spent most of yesterday fiddling with computers instead of working for the taxpayer. The project to learn WordPress and move Funny over there is coming right along, and in theory I could claim it’s sorta like work, because my EA (editorial assistant, a.k.a. her Sanchita Panza to my Doña Quixote) and I have conceived the idea of creating a blog for our office on the university’s intranet, which happens to use…yes! WordPress! So it’s all stewing together in the same pot

Worked…played…whatever I was doing until after midnight; then up at 5:00 a.m. for the usual round of chores and racing out the door. Labored like Sancho’s mule! But I learned a lot, figured out which posts to copy into WordPress, learned how to insert images (not as easy as it looks), found out some strange things, learned some HTML code (d’you know how long it’s been since I took an HTML class and decided I just didn’t want to know that?), and actually read an entire learned article on feminist epistemology for Our Beloved Employer.

WordPress is so, soooo different from iWeb. If only all the kewl things about each could be amalgamated into one fantastic blogging program. It is, for example, extremely cool that in iWeb you can drag & drop or copy-and-paste Sancho there into your page and he will appear online as he appears in iWeb. But it is also extremely cool that in WordPress you can type in a caption and voilà! the cutline appears below the image, unlike the one I just built in a textbox, which could appear…oh, just about anywhere on this page. We shall see after I (don’t) post it to the Web.

How kewl is it, though, that WordPress works with LaTex? OMG!!!

Apple sent out a groveling e-mail to its paying customers, promising that things are now so much better. Dollahs to donuts when I hit publish I will again be told that iWeb failed to publish, and again a visible but static page will appear online

The new young guru in my building at GDU, BTW, is an Apple acolyte (is that an Applyte?). He was surprised that I had managed to change the language for my Dell laptop’s log-in routine to Arabic. I suggested it was a terrorist plot to blow up GDU’s president, the Raven. He said, “Nevermore!” After some fretting around, we figured out the best way to approach the Arabic invasion was to crash the system, duck for cover, and then reboot. It worked. One shock treatment and Dell speaks English again.

At any rate, the kid couldn’t understand why I would feel any sense of dismay toward the beloved Apple. I offered to pay him to untangle the mess MobileMe has made of my system. He ducked for cover again

In another few days, I hope to complete the iWeb-to-Wordpress migration. Annoyingly enough, our office is getting some work in-house, dead of summer or no, and on the side I’ve fallen behind on a client’s project, so I will be reduced to working for pay. But as soon as the switchover is done, you should be able (I hope) to access it at a funny-about-money.com URL. I do hope.

MacHeadache

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Well, I’m off the air.

Apple has decided to decommission Mac.com, a service for which I was “automatically” charged another $100 a month ago, and migrate all the data on those servers to a new service, adorably called “MobileMe.

Yech! Steve: spare us the cutesiness.

And spare us the hassle. The reason I bought a Mac specifically was to get around the endless updates and security panics and virus-checker gum-ups and ever-shifting anti-malware programs served up to us daily by Microsoft. For naught: the Mac has been downloading software updates-to Safari, iTunes, and Intel security-for almost two hours and still has a ways to go.

But today’s supreme annoyance is this elaborate migration, which has taken down my Website and may have brought an end to my blog. Turns out you must have the Leopard operating system to operate the new Mac.com, and I only have the Panther system. (ohhh aren’t those names cu-u-u-u-u-t-e?) So how do I get access to the $100 service I just paid for? Shell out some more cash for a new OS.

When I expressed my rage about this to one of Apple’s service folks, she arranged to get me a free upgrade to Leopard (something that thrills me not, since I’m told it gums up the works just as surely as will loading an upgrade from XP to Vista into a PC). She also arranged an appointment with an “Apple Genius” to get the upgrade done and to try to get my blog back online.

That will be next Sunday. I’m told this process will take upwards of an hour and a half. Remains to be seen whether it works.

Not that I don’t appreciate the “free” upgrade, you understand. But today is Thursday. Sunday is the 13th, three days hence. On the 15th—a workday!—I’ve committed to do the Carnival of Money Stories. How, really, am I gunna do that in two days, both of which I’m supposed to spend at a paying job?
Well, if I can access the submissions, I obviously can write them in Word, do some but not all of the formatting in Word, paste into iWeb, and then finish the job after the weekend. We are talking hassle here, major hassle.

This may be even more infuriating than the BS I’ve been through with Microsoft over the years. Maybe. Possibly not, but it’s very, very close. I will say the newer versions of Office are enough to inspire plots of terrorist attacks on Microsoft HQ. But Mac’s versions of Word and Quicken are already so aggravating that if you haven’t blown up MS or Intuit over those, you probably never will.

And how can I describe the love-hate relationship with iWeb?

It is, in short, software for tyros. Blogware for hobbyists. Playware, not real software. It’s fine for displaying a few photos to your extended family, but very weak for daily blogging. SEO? What is that? “Senior Executive Officer”? The iWeb program is hopeless for search-engine optimizing, because unless you are techie to the extreme, you can’t break into the code to add the HTML snippets needed to get yourself registered with outfits like Technorati and Google.

The program does allow you to enter snippets to make buttons, but about 90% of the time they don’t work. I can’t, for example, create a StumbleUpon button. Well, I can, but it looks pretty bizarre, and “functional” is not a term I’d grope for to describe the result. I can’t move the PF Buzz button to a place on the page next to the list of tags—if I do, it stops working. I can’t put an RSS feed button on every page-it resides on the index page and only on the index page. But if you select one of iWeb’s photo templates, on those there’s an RSS feed on every page. Gee, thanks, Steve. And I dare not-oh, I do mean dare not!-subscribe to Feedburner. God only knows what that would do.

I am so angry at being made to jump through these hoops—and with such perfect timing!—I could bite! This is stupid, unnecessary, and a GD nuisance. And I’m disappointed to the stage of fury at the cheesiness of programs billed to be superior to Microsoft programs. They’re not. Not by a long shot.

The next computer is gunna be an $800 PC.

1 Comment left on iWeb site
Pete

It does seem supremely lame that Apple migrated you to MobileMe without being sure you had a system that was compatible. I don’t know if .Mac is (was) technically aware on an ongoing basis what version of Mac OS you use, but it stands to reason, and they could have been smart enough not to migrate anyone who would break without warning. I’m not sure what the alternative would be, but they could at least have given you a chance to migrate elsewhere if you needed to.

But the rest of this stuff? Having a computer is just about the opposite of simplicity and frugality. In fact, to achieve anything resembling computing peace of mind, simplicity and frugality need to go right out the window. Here are a couple of examples:

Broadband would make those system updates download in a reasonable amount of time. Windows wouldn’t be any better in this respect. For that matter, neither would Linux. All the major operating systems are pushing big updates out to the installed base on a regular basis.

Panther is two major versions of the operating system behind. I realize you’re not the sort who gets jollies from a computer for its own sake, and that’s fine, but in general you would experience fewer crises of this magnitude if you were to keep up with the Joneses. Running Panther today is like running Windows 2000.

As far as iWeb goes, well, given that you’re aware of its limitations, I’m not sure why you torture yourself with it when there are so many free blog publishing solutions out there on the web

Tuesday, July 15, 2008 – 12:49 AM