This is probably more revolutionary that you care about but Ben Hammersley has stopped using Movable Type for his blog. He’s moved to iWeb, the Apple app for making web pages with the minimal of effort. What’s interesting is that Ben is no slouch when it comes to blogging – he’s responsible for the current implemetation of blogs on the Guardian site (powered by MT) and has written a book on RSS. He’s one of the people I’ve looked to regarding what’s going on it blogging over the years, and he’s moved to Apple’s version of FrontPage for his personal site. Web standards and semantic markup be damned. What’s that all about?
As he explains in these two posts, he’s having fun. iWeb allows him to play about with typesetting and layouts that a template-driven site with strict validation won’t allow. The text in that second post is just a big PNG image for heaven’s sake! But the thing is, it looks really good. Each post is crafted as a unique object where photography, type and content work together. (And yes, there’s still an RSS feed.)
Last year I designed a site for my mate Dave to host the trailers for his short movie. Being a professional Photoshop user with a good design sense he sent me the designs as fully realised screenshots which I tortuously adapted into reasonably compliant markup. It was a pain in the arse for both him and me but we got there in the end. A month ago he got hold of a copy of iWeb, threw together a new site in a couple of days and uploaded it. And he enjoyed the experience. He now has a site that looks exactly how he wants it to without having to involve a 3rd party “expert” who repeatedly tells him that sort of thing can’t be done “properly”.
Have you noticed how weblogs all look the same these days? Not the Blogger ones with the standard templates – the so-called A-list blogs. They’re all very simple column layouts with minimal clutter and a lot of white. Now, simple is good and very hard to get right, but I suspect there’s another reason. If you want to do anything other than the basic text-document layout with CSS it’s a monumental pain in the arse and when you get it right nobody notices. So why bother?
As it happens I still like playing about with raw HTML and CSS occasionally. I’m slowly working on a new blog at the moment based on some designs by a friend of mine and it’s going to be pretty much standards based. And this blog is going to stay with MT for the forseable future because I like it. But I’m a pseudo-expert, a dilettante who likes getting under the hood and understands the limits. Normal people don’t get that. They want it to look the way they want it to look and bollocks to the “right way”.
And, if I’m honest, that saying bollocks is a damn good thing. All the great leaps in design (and granted a whole heap of messy shit) came from someone saying bollocks to the right way. There wasn’t a standards council for the wild world of zines back in the day and for good reason – every zine was a unique object from the words inside to the way it was stapled it represented the person who made it. “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” If web standards suit what you want to achieve with your internet presence then use them, but if they don’t then fuck ‘em.
Which is one of the reasons I’m no longer doing web design for hire. The way I see it, if your content is good enough it does’t matter what the layout looks like so get over to Blogger or LiveJournal. And if the design is that important to you then Do It Yourself. Either learn the hard stuff or get iWeb or some other point-and-click design package and get on with it.
I have to admit that I dismissed iWeb when it was announced in January. But this was based on two factors. One we have had a lot of trouble with iPhoto (the dreaded grey thumbnail problem that is fully acknowledged by Apple as they have published work-a-rounds on their help page). Two I had only just started using Blogger.
I am not inclined to try iWeb, though, because it appears not to be interactive other than offering RSS. Or am I missing something?
I think for what you’re doing the combo of Blogger and Flickr is fine. But when I come to put this book online something like iWeb may well be more effective than just whacking it all into blogging software.
Oh! this is interesting. I recently bought the latest iLife partly because of iWeb. Haven’t got round to playing with it all that much, but it does look pretty & is very easy to use. The thing that puts me off is that my previous web design thingy also had an inbuilt FTP command, and iWeb doesn’t (as far as I can tell) unless you want to upload to your dot Mac account. But given that I want to get myself a different host for my site anyway, I have a few things to sort out yet before redesigning it….
Jenni: You can save the whole site to a folder and then FTP that – at least that’s what my mate Dave did. It’s an extra step but it does mean you don’t need a .Mac account.
I remember moaning about this sort of thing – how stupidly hard work it was/and still is trying to make web pages look good using css, (which let’s face it is for coders – not normal human beings) and the grief I got from some commenters touting the same old party line they’d cribbed off web monkey or AListApart doesn’t bear thinking about.
Now we’re ‘allowed’ to have fun again? About time.
Have you heard about the new google app – that let’s you design web pages online in real time – no forms – no muss?