My theme this month seems to be new software... I'm in the process of converting this site from iWeb to Sandvox which is a fair amount of work as you have to copy over each blog post, one at a time and then fix formatting on links in the post. I will miss iWeb in some ways as it had a lot of nice features for making a very pretty site. I loved the ability to include shadows and reflections on my photos. The shadows gave the photos a three-dimensional feel to the site, which was pretty cool. Unfortunately, the shadows no longer work in Firefox. They might start working again if I republished the site, but it doesn't seem worth it.
Flowers from a bush out front of our house.
On the other hand, I was tired of iWeb's very poor commenting system and its limits on inserting html boxes -- such boxes had to be in fixed locations on the page and text couldn't flow around it. That meant that if you didn't allow enough space, you might find them overlapping a text box. The other huge drawback was very weak commenting system -- no way to subscribe to comments via email or RSS feed and commenting only works on MobileMe. That brings me to the next drawback to iWeb: MobileMe is going away in June 2012. iWeb sites can be hosted elsewhere on the site but then you lose comments and some other nice features altogether. Also, Apple is no longer updating iWeb though you can still buy it. I hoped for years, that Apple would fix the comments, etc, but I'm giving up now.
I am already seeing some nice features in Sandvox, beyond supporting decent comments. It publishes fast. You can tell it where to put each directory within the site. I also like how you can have a sidebar that appears on all the pages. There is more control over where the site publishes -- in iWeb, you had to publish in a subfolder, which I didn't like at all because I only had one site to publish, so all the pages had "Main" in the path for no good reason. However, it's handy now because I can publish this site to the liz4cps.com home directory and not damage the old site since it's all inside Main.
Another nice feature is how you can mark a post as a draft that you're still working on and still publish. I've been keeping drafts elsewhere; keeping them here will be more convenient.
One kind of humorous thing: I was looking at how my site looks kind of plain, without a lot of graphics, etc, when it dawned on me that I had set it up that way because photos stand out better on a plainer background. So, oh yeah! I should add photos to the pages as I make them. I do like that I don't have to put a photo on every blog post, but I might keep it up, anyway, just because it's fun and prettier.
