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One Response to “Mac OS X Tools: iBlog”  

1. 1 W. Johnson Nov 18th, 2004 at 12:43 am

   With the impending arrival of our daughter Kylie, earlier this year I set out to find a new tool for managing our family’s webpage. Prior to her arrival, site updates have been few and far between, so I just used basic HTML pages and updated the index page whenever I posted new content. Once Kylie was on the scene, though, I was pretty sure the relatives would want more regular updates, so I wanted a tool to ease site updates. I thought that I could use a blogging tool (along with some custom HTML code), so I started testing. I probably ran through 10 to 15 different blog tools, covering those based on PHP, Perl, and even straight HTML. None seemed to do exactly what I wanted, or required amazingly complex setup (I never managed to get the complete set of Perl modules required to get Movable Type running locally), or cost more money than I was willing to spend on the family site.

   Then I heard about iBlog, a blogging tool designed to work with various servers, including .mac, WebDAV, AFP, and http://FTP. Unlike server-oriented solutions, iBlog creates local static HTML pages, and then uploads those to your site. This has both pros and cons; if you need a truly dynamic site with comments and other “realtime” features, iBlog may not meet your needs (though the iBloggers.net site has some good workarounds). For my relatively static family site, though, iBlog seems nearly perfect.

   iBlog features an easy to use interface that lets you create multiple weblogs (so you could have a “His” and “Hers” weblog on the same .mac account, for instance). Once you’ve created a site, you can add categories, and entries within the categories. Controlling the look of your site is relatively easy, too — the “Manage Stylesheets” wizard lets you specify colors for the avrious parts of the page, and shows a sample of the finished look. There’s also a “Manage Template Sets” wizard that gives you further control over the placement and content of your blog. To really totally customize the look, though, you’ll also want to dive into the style sheets themselves to modify things like font sets, link behavior, and other such niceties.

   This is one area where I’ve run into some issues, though they’re probably related to my lack of understanding of the system (I’ve only been playing with it for a few days). The first time I hand-modified the CSS page, everything worked fine. The next time I published, though, the original fonts, sizes, and colors returned. I’ve worked around this by locking the CSS file after I edit it, and this seems to work fine (though I need to dive into the documentation a bit more to figure out why it’s doing what it’s doing).

   The only real downside to iBlog is also it’s strength — since it creates static HTML pages, you don’t need any knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Perl, etc. in order to get it up and running … but you also miss out on features such as a comment system, searchable stories, and other such things. However, for the basic needs of keeping my family up to date on Kylie’s progress, it’s nearly the perfect tool. When combined with .mac’s easy-to-create slideshows, it’s a nearly unbeatable combination.

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