With the recent fanfare over the announcement of iCloud and iOS 5, the rumors finally came through. The era MobileMe as we knew it was coming to an end, and it was a long time coming. Being a subscriber of MobileMe since 2004 during it's .mac days - haven't I told you that I'm a Mac fanboy? - the webmail service and other utilities it offered - iDisc especially was pretty cumbersome. And worst of all was iWeb. It was a closed platform and it was only possible to update the site from a single computer! Even if you were to used another Mac and log into the system, you would not be able to enter iWeb. It was a closed - and doomed - platform.
My previous attempt at starting a blog using the iWeb platform were abandoned not once, twice, but three times. I just couldn't cope with the interface. I can't customise the blog, nor can I update it on the fly. That really defeated the purpose of it being a mobile platform. I finally got my act together to start this blog and I have been active since its inception in March 2009 - this was the first entry. I have since had close to 800 blog entries, and the main reason for its longevity if you could call it that was the brilliant web hosting service from SquareSpace. I couldn't speak highly enough of the platform. I can update the blog directly of any web browser, iPhone, iPad, or just through a plain old email.
The longest surviving site I maintained on an iWeb platform was harisphotoblog.com. It was mainly a flash portal from my SmugMug storage. It just needed maintaining every few weeks or so, but even then, I felt the pain every time an update was needed. The upload failure rate was also rather high, and options were limited. I was not able to inject too much code into the system at all.
From next June, iWeb would cease to exist. I therefore decided to bail out, and opened another SquareSpace site. The difference was spectacular. I was able to post the photos and slideshows at HD size. The site was more customisable and the analytics were more thorough. Have a look at the site. You might find it a hard squeeze if you were browsing in a laptop or a mobile device ........
