Apple Peel

They Blog, You Blog, iBlog

If you spend any significant amount of time reading technology-related web sites, then you have undoubtedly at least heard of the latest “trend” in online communications: blogging. Whether it is only a passing “trend” or a more definitive paradigm shift in online communications and beyond will only be established with certainty for everyone in time. But you can already make up your own opinion about the phenomenon by exploring it in the here and now.

While I am far from being an expert on the subject (and I am sure that this article will contain many approximations that will sound like atrocities to the ears of blogging experts), I thought I should discuss it from the point of view of the ordinary, connected Mac user at this point in time — especially in light of the fact that I have just started my own blog. I now have, in other words, some first-hand experience, and some of it might be interesting to other Applelust readers — especially those who are also writers themselves.

In this article, I will not get into an comprehensive discussion of what blogs (short for weblogs) are (or are not). A quick search with Google will show you that there is already plenty of material to read on the subject — and that’s precisely part of the problem. For the ordinary Mac user, the whole blogging phenomenon has become so huge that it is a bit intimidating. It is also based on technologies, standards and protocols are not (or not always) exactly Mac-friendly. In other words, like it or not, if you are interested in blogging, you’ll have to read at least a little bit about things such as XML-RPC, RSS, and other similarly exciting stuff.

More importantly, if you are interested in starting your own blog as a Mac-using writer, you should know that there are a variety of options — which are not necessarily in competition with each other. Some of them are decidedly user-hostile, while others are significantly closer to the ideal of a blogging tool for non-tech types.

iBlog

When I first decided that I wanted to try this blog thing out, the one thing that pushed me over the edge was a news item about iBlog, a Mac OS X-only application that enables you to post a blog on your .Mac homepage. I figured that an application that was created to be used in combination with one’s .Mac account couldn’t be too user-hostile. In addition, apart from my @mac.com email address, I wasn’t using my $50 .Mac subscription much, and I thought that this could turn out to be a way to put it to good use for once and to justify the (still very debatable) expense.

The iBlog program is indeed quite Mac-friendly. It downloads and installs like a charm, and, provided that you have a .Mac account, you can be up and running in no time. I soon found out, however, that iBlog depends on mounting my iDisk to my desktop to upload blog files to the home page and effectively “publish” them. The problem is that, no matter how much Apple claims to have improved things, and no matter how fast your machine is (mine is a dual-1.25 GHz G4 — no slouch!), trying to use the iDisk through a modem connection in Mac OS X is utterly painful. The process of mounting and using iDisk in Mac OS X’s Finder through a modem connection regularly causes the Finder to seize up and become unusable for extended periods of time. If you are trying to do anything else in the Finder at the same time — well, you can’t. This was not a realistic option for me. So much for putting my .Mac subscription to good use!

Fortunately, iBlog also offers the option to upload your blog files to your own web server via FTP. This is obviously much better for people in my situation, because the FTP uploading process is handled by the iBlog application itself, which means that you can easily continue to do other stuff in the Finder and elsewhere while iBlog is publishing your latest blog entry.

After a few hours of use, however, I found that iBlog was significantly wanting in several other respects. Some problems have to do with basic interface issues. Several preference settings are utterly non-intuitive. The “progress” bar for FTP uploads is pretty much useless, since it doesn’t give any indication of where in the process you are. It just displays the “candy bar” animation until the process is over. With my slow and sometimes unreliable modem connection, I need to know at all times how well uploads and downloads are going. Such limited visual feedback is not acceptable.

More importantly, however, I found that the HTML templates that the iBlog application uses to create web pages based on your blog entries are written in HTML code that is far from being standards-compliant, and that opportunities to customize the code are quite limited. This did not suit me. I need HTML code that’s fairly standards-compliant to begin with, and then I need to be able to customize it to my own needs.

Finally, iBlog has other limitations — such as only supporting one category per blog entry — that go against intuition and my own rapidly emerging needs as a blogger. No matter how many different categories I divide my life into as the subject of my blogging activities, there is bound to be some overlap, and I therefore need to be able to assign more than one category to a single blog entry.

MovableType

I soon gave up on iBlog and decide to explore the “industrial-strength” cross-platform tools that are more intrinsically linked to the emergence and evolution of the blogging phenomenon. One of them is MovableType. The web site for the tool looks polished and friendly enough. But as I started reading, I quickly realized that this tool, while it would run under Mac OS X (as a Perl-based tool), would require a lot of work on my part, and would also require access to a server with CGI capabilities. I have nothing against learning, and at that point I did remember that the web space that I rent for my regular web site does provide, as part of the package, access to CGI capabilities. In other words, I was willing to explore. But the installation process itself, as described on the MovableType site, does sound intimidating, especially for someone like me, whose experience of “interactive” web site development is limited to publishing FileMaker Pro databases on a Mac server running Mac OS 8.6, with a certain amount of CDML-based customization.

Before I took the jump and started to try and learn all these things that I have always been interested in learning, but have never had the time nor the motivation to learn, I decided to explore other available options. Since I knew that Dave Winer was and still is at the forefront of blogging activities online and had his own company (UserLand) with blogging-related products, I decided to check his stuff out. You might have heard of Manila, which is decidedly in the “groupware” category, i.e. software purchased by system administrators with significant budgets and resources (Manila is $899). For individual end users such as myself, the product to check out is Radio.

I was relieved to see that UserLand offers Mac versions of its products, including a Mac OS X version of Radio. I was also relieved to see the price (Radio is $39.95 for a one-year subscription). And I was reasonably impressed with the feature set. As well, you can download a fully-functional version that will run for one month before you have to pay for it. This definitely sounded much more appealing than the MovableType option. I did not hesitate any further, and took the plunge.

Radio UserLand

While iBlog is a stand-alone client application doing all the work involved in turning your text into blog entries ready for online publishing, and MovableType is a mostly server-based solution that requires a lot of server configuration, Radio UserLand strikes a reasonable middle-ground by doing most of its work locally as a background application running on your Mac — but there is also a significant amount of communication going on between the application and UserLand’s servers, which can be used to host your blog (with an URL of the form: <http://radio.weblogs.com/yourUserNumber>, where <yourUserNumber> is the number assigned to you when you first subscribe to the service). Even if you use your own server to host your blog, there is still a fair amount of communication happening between the Radio application running in the background on your Mac and UserLand’s servers. Fortunately, this all works rather seamlessly and the size of the data transferred is normally small enough that, even with a modem connection, you don’t really notice any network performance hit. An unlimited connection to the Internet is useful if you are planning on updating your blog several times a day, but you still have the option to work offline and publish your stuff later, if needed.

The Radio application running on your computer, however, is mostly a background application. Its main window displays the current status of Radio’s activities. But most of the visual interaction between Radio and the end user takes place within your web browser. In fact, Radio runs as a local web server, and all its functionality is accessed by default through Explorer, using a local IP address (http://127.0.0.1:5335).

The first significant problem I encountered with Radio is that it more or less requires Microsoft Explorer as the browser used to access the local server. This might have made sense a few months ago, when Explorer was still the browser installed on most Macintosh computers running Mac OS X. However, since then Apple has launched Safari, with great success. Radio does in fact run properly to a certain degree in Safari. (You can simply access the server at http://127.0.0.1:5335 by entering that address in Safari.) But when installing Radio for the first time, you still need to use Explorer. (If you don’t, and you try to fool Radio into believing that Safari is Explorer, as I did, you will soon find that it doesn’t work, and that, once you’ve done that, the only solution is to remove Radio from your hard drive entirely and start again from scratch.)

The Explorer requirement is particularly problematic in light of the fact that Explorer’s own text-editing features are rather limited. (It doesn’t support drag-and-drop text editing or Mac OS X’s built-in spell-checking features, for example.) Safari is better in that it has a much higher level of compliance with Mac OS X’s built-in technologies (whereas Explorer for OS X is basically an Aqua-fied version of Explorer for OS 9). Fortunately, once Radio is up and running, you can still use Safari for most of your work — or there are also dedicated third-party products that can be used to edit your Radio blog, such as the recently released NetNewsWire. (NetNewsWire Lite is a freeware version that is limited to blog reading. NetNewsWire is $29.95 and can also be used to maintain your own blog.) Still, I hope that a new version of Radio will soon support Safari as the browser of choice of Mac OS X users.

This particular limitation is actually reflective of a wider problem with Radio UserLand, which is that it’s not a package that is particularly Mac OS X-friendly. There are some features that simply don’t work in OS X, such as the ability to use a WYSIWYG editor in Explorer for blog editing. In other words, for simple things such as formatting text in bold or italics, you need to use HTML tags manually. Radio also stores all its files (and there is a great number of them) inside the application folder itself, instead of using Mac OS X’s Library folder. It doesn’t support accented characters in category names. Radio also often seizes up when I try to quit it as part of a logout sequence, forcing me to force-quit it. Etc.

The other limitation that I found was that, as an end user application, Radio does not provide a search tool for your blog. The only way that readers have to explore your blog is to navigate its category-based structure or use the calendar feature to go back and forth in time. Once a blog becomes fairly big, this can become an issue. But there is probably no easy solution to this problem, other than purchasing a server-based solution such as Manila or setting up a much more complex tool such as MovableType.

All in all, however, Radio works fine. And exploring its many options makes you realize that, as its current version number indicates (8.0.8), this is a very mature and powerful program, built on years of experience in publishing blogs, and many more years of experience in developing a comprehensive scripting and web development platform known as Frontier, which is where most of UserLand’s products find their origin and is still used as one of its architectural foundations.

The documentation claims that you’ll be up and running, publishing your own blog, in less than 5 minutes. In my experience, this is not quite true —the main reason being that the product interface and its many settings are not all entirely intuitive. There are several concepts that took me a while to grasp and embrace as a Mac user. And there are simply too many settings to explore right away. But this learning curve is well worth it and, a few days after I’d first installed it, I found that I was already very comfortable using Radio and posting to my blog, and also interested in learning even more about this whole new online technology and “culture”.

Conclusion (for now)

As a writer, I can only be enthusiastic about the opportunities offered by the blogging paradigm and about its potential as a tool that will redefine the way that we interact with the information, resources, and works that are available online and beyond.

As the company claims, Radio UserLand is indeed “turning the Web into a fantastic writing environment.” It still needs work when it comes to fully integrating into the unique work environment provided by Mac OS X and offering all the writing aids that a writer needs — but it is already quite exciting as it is, and traditional Mac users such as myself, who have been itching to explore this new medium, should not hesitate to take the plunge as long as they are willing to spend a few hours learning how to use a new writing tool, and willing to put up with certain aspects that are not particularly Mac-friendly. (Some of the shortcomings of Explorer or Safari as text-writing tools can be alleviated by using a tool such as Spell Catcher for OS X to automate spell-checking and the typing of often-used phrases.)

From the perspective of a Mac user who’s particularly attached to user-friendliness and intuitiveness, I’d say that Radio UserLand is “almost there” and that the next generation of such tools will definitely be accessible to the ordinary Mac user with no great difficulty.

In the mean time, I invite you to check out my own blog, which is of course, available both in HTML form as a web site at <http://www.latext.com/blog/> or as a series of RSS feeds, the main one of which can be found at <http://www.latext.com/blog/rss.xml>. I will cover a wide range of topics, but Macintosh computing will always be a major focus, and this blog will give me the opportunity to share more of my daily work as a Mac user, developer, and trouble-shooter. (The RSS feed for Mac-related items is at <http://www.latext.com/blog/categories/macintosh/rss.xml>.)

Feel free to send me feedback by email or through the blog’s “Comments” feature — provided courtesy of Radio UserLand, of course!

- Pierre Igot

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