I wouldn’t have thought it possible (and in fact, I didn’t…I had high hopes), but iWeb is actually worse than iPhoto + Homepage for posting photo albums online. I’m shocked. Genuinely shocked.
I can’t figure out any way to make my default .Mac page point to an iWeb site (iWeb now uses “web” as a subfolder on your iDisk instead of “Sites”…who the hell thought that was a good idea?), so here’s my new .Mac page. All the photo albums are currently just archived versions of my old iPhoto ones, because somehow they dropped the ability to make two-column photo albums, and (and this is the worst thing), they’ve made the amount of space given to captions even smaller (and that was my biggest complaint about Homepage already!).
I know Apple’s 1.0 products have a bad history, but I didn’t ask for much…all I want is a simple way to upload photos and make them look nice.
I’ll post more specifics when I’ve had a chance to fiddle with the program a bit more. Maybe I’m just missing the part of the program that doesn’t completely suck (it happens). But my initial impressions are flat out negative.
Update: Okay, it’s not as bad as I originally thought…it is better than Homepage, but in order to make it that way you have to deal with some very non-intuitive stuff. More to come.
I’m watching your throughts on iWeb (in fact, the whole iLife package) quite closely at the moment; I intend to buy just as soon as anyone can prove to me it’s worth the upgrade. Like you, my primary use for HomePage is to show photos etc. Not that I really bother at the moment.
One thing I’d really like (which I suspect isn’t likely to happen in, say, the next 10 years), is for the iWeb or Homepage URLs to become something at least approaching intuitive, and also for the ability to set up a simple “root” home page so that different bits and pieces can be prioritised. At the moment, using iPhoto 5, it looks like the default thing shown on homepage.mac.com/$user is always the first gallery. Not helpful, given that my first gallery was something I put online to show a friend what my desktop looked like…
I don’t mind hacking about in iWeb, not do I even particularly mind putting together my own pages – I just wish there was some fathomable scheme to the naming of galleries and pictures, so I could at least try to roll my own.
Oops, the server threw up some sort of internal error, which I had figured was to do with the use of $user, but it ended up posting anyway. Weird.
Also, I can’t spell. Throughts? That’s a new one.
Interesting. That does seem to cause problems. You might need to check the parsing and cleaning code for the input box to make sure it correctly converts “dollar-user”… looks like it’s breaking something in a minor way. Sorry if I broke it!
I’m not sure what causes that problem, actually. MT does that every time I republish certain pages, and it *always* does it when I republish the category pages.
It still works (as you saw), so I’ve sort of learned to live with it at this point. I just don’t have the patience to figure out the problem.