MacMost Now 565: iWeb Alternative: Google’s Blogger

A great alternative to iWeb and MobileMe web hosting the Google's free Blogger service. You can use your Google or Gmail ID and create blogs using various templates and features. It many ways it is more advanced than iWeb. You can even assign a custom domain, track statistics and post articles via email.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode let's look at Google's blogger service. if you use iWeb its time to start looking at alternatives one good alternative is blogger which is a Google service it works with your Gmail or standard Google account and it gives you a free blog but just because doesn't mean it's not good it actually has a lot of features let's take a look. Now first sign in to your Google Gmail account and then go to blogger.com. After you accept the terms of the service you will have blogger added as one of your Google services. And then blogger.com looks like this. Here you can manage blogs on blogger you can have more than one blog you can have a whole bunch of them if you want just like you could on mobileMe. And you just need to create your first blog by clicking on this button here. Get started. Now you come up with a blog title. so this could be anything so um we'll just do a title like that and then you come up with URL now the URL is gonna be "something".blogspot.com. Kind of similar to how the me.com urns worked. So you wanna come up with something here. We'll just do that and click on the check availability it says it's available and continue. And now you've created your blog. The next step is to pick a template now you'll be able to change your template to something else and even alter the template later on. So we just take a look at some of the samples here. Pick one we'll just stick with this simple one here and then continue and you can go to the main page. This is where you would write new posts so you can see here to write new posts just type in a title some text here and then you can publish it at the bottom and then you can jump to view it now this is how other people will view your post now you've got MacMostsample.blogspot.com and then the url for that post. Now if you don't want to create a blog, you just want to create a website, well consider that there's not much difference. The only difference between a website and a blog is that a blog will tend to have a series of articles or posts that have a date or time attached to them. But most websites have that anyway so no matter what your website is like you should be able to do something similar if not better as a blog as you could as a plain website there's really no difference. Now if we go back we can see all different ways we can control our blog. For instance, for posting, we could edit the posts. We can also create pages which are something like an "about me" page or a resume page or something like that that doesn't have a specific time stamp to it. So it's not like an article you've posted it's something that is always going to be there. You can control whether comments are left at your page and what comments are there. Like in Settings, that's where you do that right there and here is where you would actually review your comments. Under Settings you can control lots of different thing for how the the front page looks. You can go into different things like how frequently your posts are archived, what the ISS feed looks like. You can even have a mobile template turned on so it looks different when it's viewed on an iPhone. You can even post via an email address, a secret email address. So you can actually make posts by sending an email. So already you can see some advantages over mobileMe's iWeb. In addition to that you can go to design here and you can edit the html of your template. You could also go to the template designer here. Pick from more templates or actually alter your existing template with different backgrounds, layouts, there are tons of things you can do. Now if you're not sure that this is for you I encourage you to just create one. It's completely free and you don't have to tell anyone about it. Just add blogger to your Google account and play around with it for a bit. Experiment. See what you can do with the template. See what you can do with posting. There's a lot of different things, it's a very neat service especially for the price. There are even statistics you can get on how many people have viewed your stuff so another big advantage over iWeb. There's even a publishing option where you can use a custom domain. So you can purchase your own domain or use one that you already have and have your blog use that instead of the blogspot.com URL. So if you've already been using your own custom domain with mobileMe, you can switch that to point to your new blogger blog and everybody visiting your old page will suddenly be visiting your new one. I'll be showing you some other alternatives in future episodes to using iWeb some that are like blogging-like systems some that are like building more static type websites. So look for those. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 565: iWeb Alternative: Google’s Blogger”

Ian

13 years ago

Thanks for this Gary, very useful, as I was slowly beginning to worry what would become of my MobileMe website. Are you able to post Video/audio clips on the blog? Also, do you know of any good, but relatively straightforward to use website building programmes. iWeb is my only experience to date. Thanks

Gary Rosenzweig

Yes. You can attach photos and video to a post in Blogger. I may look at some desktop applications for building sites later this summer. But I believe that online applications (Blogger, WordPress, etc) are a much better way to build sites.

Tim

Nice Video Garry. I use Freeway (www.softpress.com) and does a lot more of the static HTML stuff iWeb did plus allows you to design your own Blogger page. Looking forward to the other tips.

George

Thanks Gary, the info on alternatives to mobile me have been very useful.
Keep up the good work, looking forward to more of your insights.

Falconius

It seems that with the dissolve of programs such as iweb that allowed non technical users to create impressive websites, apple is choosing to focus more on connectivity rather than creativity. I always was drawn to apple since it embraced the philosophy that the act of creating is more important than the networking endeavors of microsoft. I guess with the coronation of i cloud, apple has tossed its' once famed art brushes from "Paint" to the wind.

I would like to think that Apple just came to its senses. I think things like Google Sites are much better at "allowing non technical users to create impressive websites." iWeb was an attempt for Apple to build something like that, but it failed.

Jacquelon Manion

I have a question regarding switching to Google's Blogger. I use IWeb to create my blog but GoDaddy to host. I understand that if I move to Blogger, Google must also host the my blog. My question is in setting up my blog with Blogger. I am not sure I understand how to setup my blog using my current domaine name. Should I setup the blog under a different name and then cancel GoDaddy. If I cancel GoDaddy now, my blog will be shut down. Please note that I tried to use WordPress but found it too difficult with my limited abilities. Thank you for your help.

There are many ways to do it. I would sit down with a blogger or hosting expert to find out more about all of them. But searching online turns up the information too, if you have some technical know-how. See http://help.godaddy.com/article/5112, for instance.

i.m.joseph

Hello Again Gary,

I was hoping that the iweb pages could be posted to any other web site or blogger site. Is this possible? And if so, how can we do it, please.

thanks
i.m.joseph

Yes, it can. In the Site Publish Settings for any iWeb site you have created, you can choose MobileMe, FTP Server or Local.

newbie

"Dumb" question(s):
1. within iweb, when you select publish locally to a folder, does this mean it just saves all the files to one place organized "as is" from iweb?
2. if you do this, will you also then be able to publish to the web, either iweb or a new server such as godaddy, etc?

I don't want to go through the trouble of uploading all files to create something new for what i have on iweb
(was basically just a portfolio type site with various media on it, i.e. print, radio spots, tv spots, etc. (some of which I no longer have access to)

1. Yes.
2. You can then upload that folder to a web hosting service to put the site you have hosted there. It is a slow way to develop a site, as any changes you make mean replacing everything.
You may want to look for another option as iWeb is pretty much dead. If you are set on using something like it (develop local, then upload) then look in the Mac app store for alternatives.

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MacMost Now 565: iWeb Alternative: Google’s Blogger

Comments: 12 Responses to “MacMost Now 565: iWeb Alternative: Google’s Blogger”

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