When I went to bed last Thursday, my computer was fine. When I came home from work on Friday, my computer was not fine. The OS had frozen, and no amount of mouse clicking or keyboard button pressing would awake it from its ice cold slumber. Connecting remotely via SSH also did not work, which really had me worried. The obvious fix (which I learned from years of using Windows) was to give the computer an old fashioned hard reset. When this failed twice, my next option was to boot up using my most recent operating system CD and to try to check/repair the disk using Disk Utility. When Disk Utility puked at me 2-3 times, I knew I was in trouble. In one last ditch effort I went old school from the singler-user command line and attempted a /sbin/fsck -fy, which also failed. Even after all the futile attempts at salvaging my disk, I knew that I had a Time Machine backup safe and secure on an external USB drive that basically contained a clone of my computer, so in theory all of my files should be just fine.

For those of us that have spent any extended amount of time in the Land of Academia, theory isn’t always backed up by empirical data…or is it empirical data isn’t always backed up by theory? Either way, I remember in physics lab once or twice when I may or may not have fudged some data points to make them fit better on the trend line. In my present day story, I had no control over the trend line and had no effect on whatever outcome Time Machine had in store for me. I had never tested out a full system restore from a Time Machine backup and had no idea if it would really work. All I could do was cross my fingers and wait the seven hours that it would take to fully restore my 300GB of data. I went to bed wondering and hoping that everything would be a success, however, I had my doubts.

Before we continue, I’d like to make a point for all the Mac haters. Apple does not design or manufacturer hard drives (sidebar). The hard drive in my iMac could be the same hard drive that is found in your Dell or your HP or whatever other non-Apple piece of hardware you own. All Apple did with my iMac was pick a good vendor and a good model, then stuck it into the machine. In fact, you can read the specs on the Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS that failed me on their website. Actually, now that I think about it, this is NOT the first Western Digital drive that I’ve owned that has suffered a premature death. Interesting.

Moving on, the next morning I woke up to the pleasant site of a fully restored system using a brand new hard drive. I had lost nothing.* Time Machine had succeeded! The free app built directly into the operating system had worked exactly as advertised, and as and end user, I couldn’t be more thrilled with the outcome. Time Machine had kept my files safe, and when I needed them was right there to say, “Here you go, Mr. Lepolt, sorry for your troubles.” That’s exactly how I would expect backup software to work. Bravo.

If you own a Mac, use Time Machine.

*Time Machine allows users to “ignore” directories to backup, and as expected these directories were not restored.

Apparently I find it more funny than she does.

We have since taken care of the “problem.”

iWeb comes standard with the most recent versions of iLife.  From Apple’s webpage: “iWeb makes it easy to create a website that’s stunningly beautiful — and totally you. Start with an Apple-designed theme, then customize it with your own text, photos, movies, and podcasts until it’s exactly what you want. And switch themes with a click anytime.”  These things are all true, although I found myself trying to make my sites more complex than iWeb had in mind.  More on that later.

iWeb was designed with the idea that its users would integrate with their .Mac account.  .Mac is simply Apple’s web hosting service that costs more than pretty much anyone else, and gives you less storage space and bandwidth.  .Mac does give you some new email addresses and the ability to sync/backup documents from your computer, but all things considered I would never purchase an account with them.

This already begins to affect the iWeb functionality, as you must have a .Mac account to use certain features such as blog comments, interactive picture slideshows, and only publishing changes from pages that have changed.  Confused?  Yeah, I don’t think it makes much sense either. 

Since I have a programming background, I decided that I could create a blog from a third party blogging site, update my blog template to match my iWeb template, and seamlessly integrate them together so that no one would be able to tell a difference.  Well, that didn’t work because the iWeb templates use a bunch of JavaScript, CSS, images, and some other stuff that made it more difficult than it was worth to try to mimic.  So, screw that idea.  After that failed I busted out my trusty Internet friend, Google, to see if other people had tried the same thing I did.  Turns out they did, and I came upon an application called iComment (link).

iComment utilizes a free third party commenting system called HaloScan (link) that users can integrate into pretty much whatever site they want.  I downloaded the demo of iComment to try it out and see if I liked it.  After running iComment a few times, I figured out that it was simply parsing my HTML pages and replacing/inserting text that HaloScan requires to display comments on a page.  Again, since I have a programming background I figured I could do that myself.  Turns out, this actually worked.  One excellent new feature of iWeb is called Web Widgets.  These things let you insert code directly into your HTML page, which was exactly what I need with HaloScan.  Sweet, right? 

I thought I was done. 

When I was testing my new comment functionality, I was using a web browser with an ad blocking add-in installed…this therefore meant that the ads HaloScan was inserting near my blog comments were not visible to me.  It wasn’t until my friend mentioned something to me that I noticed.  Since I didn’t set this page up to make money and look like crap, I kicked HaloScan off and decided to drop iWeb altogether.  I’ve since switched to WordPress as my blogging tool, and simple CSS for the layout.

Now don’t get me wrong here, iWeb certainly is nice.  It is by far the easiest web design tool that I have ever used.  It integrates very well with iPhoto so if you want a photo in a certain place you can simply drag and drop it on the page wherever you want.  It doesn’t get a whole lot simpler than that.  iWeb also comes with about 25 unique template styles, each with eight page styles so you can create a new page based on what it will be used for.  Example: blog, pictures, etc.  iWeb is also much, much nicer when it is used with .Mac, so all of the iWeb functionality can be used. 

For experienced web programmers, iWeb is definitely not the way to go.  There is no obvious way to make changes to the CSS, there is no easy way to edit the HTML code, and the functionality is greatly reduced when not used with .Mac.

In conclusion:
The Great
Ease of use, ability to make great looking websites without knowing a thing about the web.

The Good
Integration with iPhoto, WYSIWYG editor very intuitive to use.

The Bad
Adding HTML code through Web Widgets is awkward, publishing a site to a folder updates every single file on the site so it is difficult to upload only required files.

The Ugly
iWeb without .Mac integration is just a fancy version of Print Shop for the web.