iWeb future: Apple, do you want to ruin my digital life?

Thanks all for your suggestions. Since I'm only designing a relatively simple website for my son's Cubscout pack, I don't need anything too fancy or expensive. I'll give the suggestions here a try or just hold on to iWeb until for whatever reason I can't use it any longer. Not sure if that day will ever come since as mentioned, I still own it and can keep using it until it is no longer supported by the OS for some reason, but i doubt that will be the case with Lion.

No it won't be the case with Lion. iWeb has already been tested with Lion and it works.

I finally spent an hour on the phone with the very patient support people at Network Solutions and I can claim success!!! We had to add a directory path and change their FTP address and then toggle something that allowed their password to work, and finally the test was successful so I published, I called after 10 mins to make sure it all was being transfered. It was so I redirected domain name to them. My site was available then, but iWeb had not completed publishing. After about three hours I got the wonderful, familiar notice that it had published and did I want to visit my site? YES!!! And it is all there, including all the audio files. Whew.

Interesting discussion, especially the post which advises that iWeb still works under Lion. Very good news indeed as I have about 20,000 images and endless text info on my website.

I use iWeb to create the site for our business... http://www.johnswood.com.au/Home.html Quite some time ago I changed from the MMe server to a commercial FTP server, at an annual cost of course, but the results have been excellent. Fast, stable and plenty of support. I simply publish to the local folder on my HD, test run through Safari after any changes, then upload to the FTP server using FileZilla. Have been doing this for about 5 years now without any problems.

If my experience is any guide, any iWeb-created web site can be uploaded to an FTP server and I'm sure there are plenty out there willing to help. Some might even be free. As long as iWeb keeps running on iMacs I will carry on as usual. I'll be keeping my fingers crossed as the Lion roars, good luck to us all.

Good news: I see there is an App in the App Store that converts blogs from iWeb to Wordpress without losing anything. Bad news: It cost just under £35 It is called Wordpress Converter for iWeb

It is always a nightmare for every user who uses a software if that software is stopped and no update path is offered. Normally his leads to a desaster. I do not want to imagine waht it would mean if my Aperture library with more than 60,000 pictures would not be supported any more ...

It is a sad fact that it happens from time to time that Apple discontinues software no more and lets users alone with their problems.

Personally I remember "Hypercard", "Powermail", "Powermail Server", "Quicktime VR Authoring Studio", "Quicktime VR" as a whole tec, "iWeb" ...

Big software players can do or not do with their software what they want to do and it has something to do with making money in most cases.

So what do you think ... is it a good idea to trust on any software ore technology that is NOT open source?

Willi

PS: I do not trust my "Aperture" app ... or Big money Apple or Adopbe or Micro$oft (who?) anymore. But I am completely at the mercy.

"Nice" to see that Apple lets make money with the problems they delivered.

I think it it the *** duty of Apple to offer this for free!

Well no, because it is not for Apple to offer it for free. They are just selling it in the App Store and it was not actually produced by Apple. If you have a look it is made by Rage software, the same people who produced iWeb Sites and supply hosting in an attempt to help people who want alternatives to both iWeb and MobileMe.

My understaning of the Rage convertor is that it does a nice job of pulling over blog text, but does not pull over images that have been embedded into your blog posts. These have to be separately imported to your Wordpress media library and individually inserted into your freshly imported posts.

I'm going through the process of manually pulling over iWeb posts into WordPress, and it's really not that bad... except for the images! iWeb allows true WYSIWYG placement of images within the text flow of your posts, but image placement with WordPress's ditor is pretty unsophisticated.

The issue I'm currently facing in migrating several years worth of iWeb news posts into my WordPress blog is that I've yet to discover a good way to prevent current followers of the WordPress blog from being inundated with notifications of "new" posts, when all these posts are dated lobg ago in the past.

All other web creation tools suck. iWeb is the only one. It's the only one that works, does what it says without adding more, is easy to use, flexible and powerful. You probably know this. Giving advice like "start learning another" is pointless. Don't. Wait till Apple releases something new, or not. RapidWeaver is an inflexible money-pit, Sandvox is cheasy, Freeway has the user-interface of a pile of dog-doodoo, Flux is from some other planet where apparantly you could understand it, and Dreamweaver is four hundred dollars and has a lot of web-technologies you'd wish would die. Got it?

Start downloading copies of you "Web" folder from your iDisk, go through and copy-and-paste your blog comments, see if you can do a 'File>Save as Web Archive' from Safari, prod through message boards, and stay in a holding pattern.

Wow! That is a sweeping generalisation if ever I heard it! I can't talk for RapidWeaver, Sandvox or Freeway, but Flux 3 is actually a very good tool.

I downloaded the trial version of it and was impressed, so decided to purcahse it when it was on special offer, so got it for half price.

Flux 3 has import facilities, which none of the others do and you can start with a blank template and it shows you all your html and css and you can create both Inline and External styles and it shows you how websites should be created, so you have to work with the layers, so the body layer and navigation, footer etc. It gives you a good working idea of how websites are created and you can see the code view too.

It takes more getting used to than the others, especially if you have no knowledge of html and css, but if you work through the Quick Start Guide that is available with it and all the online tutorials, then you should have no problem and you can create websites that are also html 5 compatible.

From my point of view Flux 3 is by far the best of the lot - you just need to take the time to learn it.

The last sentence nails the problem: you have to learn to use it, much more than iWeb. A total different concept.

You also need to learn how to use iWeb.

Flux 3 however, is more representative of how websites are actually created and the fact that it has import facilities and you can view the code and your site is stored in files from the start and there is no need to back up a domain file either are all plus points.

With the use of Quick divs and Floating quick divs, it is representative of css code used to create websites.

And why is this good for users? I know what you mean, and of course Flux produces better code.

If you want to put two pictures on a page, rotate, scale, shadow, two sentences to describe the pictures, and all that can be viewed via webbrowser after 2 minutes: forget Flux and all others.

If it is important for you to produce good code, yes, Flux is the best I think.

Better code is important to me and knowing about css and html makes Flux a good choice for me.

I did try hand coding using TextWrangler at one stage to get the idea of how the html and css related to each other and it was great when you can create one css file and just insert a link to the html of other pages and they are all the same - so using one css file for the whole site rather than one css file for every page as iWeb does.

I still use iWeb though and have hand coded a lot of things on my sites to get them looking how I wanted them - I wanted to insert tables and rather than creating tables and importing them, I decided to hand code the table into an html snippet and this worked a lot better for me.

Anyway, in the end it comes down to what you are looking for - for me Flux is great because it has everything that I want and is not as expensive or complicated as DreamWeaver - a good compromise all round.