iWeb Loads Too Slow
The site that I built with iWeb loads too slow.
Now I love Apple computers and I have been a mobileme.com user since it’s upgrade from .mac. The main reason that I signed up was because of the push feature for calendar and contacts to my iPod Touch. I manage a team of six people, called my family, and having all of the calendars stay in sync with my computer automatically was a big plus for me.
But aside from the sync feature, I wasn’t using many of the other features that me.com had to offer.
I was toying with the idea of starting a family website. Since I am a private person, I didn’t like the idea of plastering the web with my family’s pictures and details of their daily happenings. I discovered that publishing a site using iWeb that is hosted at MobileMe had a password protection feature. I was quite tempted by the array of fancy templates and decided to give it a go.
I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed. Let me just say that I am running iLife ‘09 so you know where I am coming from.
Building a web page was easy enough. The drag and drop feature for pictures and videos was easy to use. But arranging items on a preset template was harder. Things would overlap and creating more space for my new objects was not intuitive. I did scan the manual but did not really pore over it.
I liked that I built the pages on my computer and uploaded them to the web. This meant that even if I cancelled my MobileMe. com service – the pages that I created in iWeb would still exist on my computer and not disappear. After all a family website is a chronicle, a history or diary of our life – and that is precious.
I think I would have stuck with it – but for the fact that the iWeb pages loaded very slowly on other people’s computers. Grandpa, for instance, uses DSL and Windows. He could not get the site to load correctly and videos took up to 15 minutes to load completely. Not very effective – since most people would click away long before the process was complete.
The only explanation for this slow load time that I could find is that iWeb pages are very graphic intensive and the underlying code is not web optimized. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to spend my time building a wonderful website that no one would be able to read.
I have since started the family website using Blogger. Blogger has a permissions feature that lets me list the emails of people that I want to access the site. However, the people should really have a gmail address so they can access the site when they are signed into their gmail account. This is harder than the iWeb process of assigning a username and password to the site itself. And it puts a burden on my relatives to sign up for a gmail account that they may not want.
Finally, now Blogger will own my site. All the pages are stored on the web – not on my computer. If they decide to shut my site down then bye, bye hard work. Or if I don’t use my account for a certain amount of time – then my site will disappear as well.
I didn’t look into WordPress.com as an alternative. But I know that it is difficult to password protect an entire site using self hosted WordPress.org.
I haven’t found an ideal solution. But if you have one – I would love to hear about it in the comments.
Entourage for Apple Mac Laptops
I spent the better part of today exploring Entourage for Apple Mac laptops.
Currently, I use the trio Apple Mail, iCal, and Address Book for Mac. They all play very nice together. But what I am missing is a project management application and Entourage offers this.
Before I go on, let me say that I have tried OmniFocus for both my notebook and my iPod Touch. I have also given Bento a whirl on my computer. But what I really want is a native application that pulls it all together and also syncs with the iPhone or Touch. I know, what will I ask for next – an iMac that actually completes the project as well?
The bottom line is that Entourage looked promising. I recently purchased the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac suite but never looked beyond Word and Excel. But now I faced the problem of having all my data sitting in the native Apple applications and me not willing to commit to switching before putting Microsoft through the paces.
Luckily, I discovered the option called Sync Services in the preferences menu. Using Sync Services, I could set Entourage to sync with address book and mobileme, ical and mobile me, and the Entourage notes could be set to sync with mobileme. I can even set one program’s data to override the other’s. Or set the sync preferences to combine the data. Perfect – now I could make changes in one application and they would automatically be reflected in the other. Problem solved! Or so I thought.
Ah what a tangled web we weave. My contacts synced just fine but not the groupings that I had set up in Address Book.
And my calendar was a different story. You see, Apple’s iCal supports multiple calendars – so I have a calendar set up for each family member plus a few other odd calendars for daily menus, soccer schedules and the like. But Entourage only supports one calendar and has multiple categories. In Entourage, I would have a main calendar and each event would be assigned a category – in my case each category would bear the name of each family member. And, you guessed it – iCal does not support categories.
When I set up Sync Services to sync my calendars what it basically did was create a new calendar in iCal called, oddly enough, “Entourage”. Anything that I enter on this calendar will sync with Microsoft Office on my Apple Mac laptops.
Lovely. (dripping with sarcasm)
So where does this leave me? I probably will leave the project management behind and continue on with the native Mac applications. Or I may use some convoluted combination of Microsoft Office, iCal, and Address Book. The problem with any productivity system is that if it becomes too complicated – well, I just don’t use it regularly enough to be effective.
And what about syncing with Mobile devices. I will explore this issue in a future post. But I have had enough frustration and learning for one day!