The macosxhints Rating:
[Score: 8 out of 10]
- Developer: Lifli Software / [Product Page]
- Price: $19.95
Then I heard about iBlog, a blogging tool designed to work with various servers, including .mac, WebDAV, AFP, and 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.

