iWeb is a pain to use w/o .Mac

I am a die-hard Apple fan, and so, in the mood to redo my website, I decided to try my hand at iWeb. I spent a few hours personalizing and tweaking, and came up with what you're looking at right now. I quite like it, especially for a template. The problems started when I tried to publish said website. I don't have a .Mac account: I'm not willing to pay $100 a year for services I can get elsewhere for free. I'm a student, do they really expect me to dish out $100 that I could use elsewhere? So, my only option is to publish to a folder and then upload it using Fetch to my website server. Imagine my surprise when I do so and open up my website to find it littered with question marks! Apparently, iWeb uses a modern form of coding for white space and special characters that my webserver just can't handle. So, I try uploading it to my PSU webspace. This server can handle the code, but not the enormously long file names iWeb gives to its blog entries and associated media. I just can't win.

I ended up spending quite a while editing iWeb's HTML in Pagespinner, my long-time favorite HTML editor (and, incidentally, a program you should try out). Thus, it has been de-special-ified and can be published to Farandola.com. It works. But, don't we expect more from Apple? I know I do.

Saturday, June 24, 2006