When I think of what iWeb should have been (or should become), I think of Windows Live Writer. WLW will publish to Windows Live Spaces, which could be equated with .Mac inasmuch as it’s a place to publish pages provided by the software creator, and additionally, WLW publishes pages to other blogging services. That’s very important. Those services include Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress, and many others.
My particular site uses Wordpress. I’d like to have an app where I can quickly and easily generate content and then publish it to my personal Wordpress installation. Blogging software that publishes to different services means that those who currently blog don’t have to give up a blogging engine and feature set they’re familiar with, try to move years of postings between different software, or be limited by the (lack of) features (iWeb) in the application’s blogging function. iWeb can still keep all of its iLife-y goodness, and I bet many of those things could be integrated into existing blog services as well. I know Wordpress provides a way to publish static pages.
Making iWeb flexible so that established bloggers can use it with existing or third party services would make iWeb inestimably more valuable and repair what has become a somewhat tarnished reputation the software has earned.
My .Mac Web Gallery
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August 14th, 2006 at 11:36 am
I don’t know about that.
iWeb is about putting the entire page creation system on the user’s desktop, then transfering to a site. Trying to make it into an interface for another content management system is to change the nature of the program altogether.
They should focus more on improving their own blogging system in iWeb, so that it would be preferred by the average joe user over these other blogging systems. That, and make it work with http://FTP.
I think that interfacing with other blogging systems is better left to developers. (Ecto, is my preferred app for this right now.)
August 14th, 2006 at 11:45 am
On the other hand…
Having just looked at Windows Live Writer, I see what you mean. No 3rd party app on the Mac quite matches the feature set of Live Writer.
But I doubt iWeb will be the app that matches LiveWriter. But in seeing how an iWeb like interface is being put into Leopard’s version of Mail.app (for HTML mail and Templates), It could be done, especially if developers can tap into that functionality themselves (admittably, a big if).
August 14th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Right now I’m using iWeb for my .Mac website, and my wife & I co-blog on blogspot. If iWeb could write to blogger (and have an easy method for publishing from multiple macs), I would be all over that.
August 14th, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Shawn, that’s the first time I’ve heard of Ecto so I decided to check it out. I think it may be just what I want.
I’ll use it for the 21 day trial period and see what I think. So far, so good.
This blog is certainly a learning experience for me.
Obi, you may want to check out Ecto as well. It supports Blogger.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
I’m a big fan of MarsEdit. It is a little more streamlined than Ecto, which is a bit much for me.
August 14th, 2006 at 2:54 pm
I’ll check out MarsEdit as well.
August 14th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
I use “PressIt” for updating my WP blog.
Mind you, I don’t really need a standalone app to bang out basic HTML and I certainly don’t need any connectivity to 3rd party blogging sites or .Mac-ish sort of services because I own a datacenter with over a thousand servers in it… bwwhaahaaahahhaaaa!
Sorry, drifted into my Evil Net master persona there.
–chuck
August 14th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
You have another persona?