In preparation for my forthcoming course on blogging at UMass, I’m trying out MacJournal to see whether it would be worth purchasing. I have, until now, blogged only using blogger, but when I purchased a new Mac this month it came with iWeb, and so I’ve been wondering about blogging apps.
iWeb is a beautiful LOOKING program, but using the templates seemed pretty clunky and formatting often screwed up when trying to substitute my own pictures for the template place holders. Also, the templates are designed to be very personal, having spots for age, major, location, etc. and seemed to really promote the journaling aspect of blogging above other genres and uses. I love Apple’s hardware and software generally speaking, but iWeb didn’t impress me. Also, a MAJOR drawback was that iWeb is pretty much designed to be used exclusively with .mac. It says that using an ftp client users can publish to a folder and then upload to their own hosting site, but the help menus don’t offer any more support than that. It seems pretty useless without a .mac account.
So that brings us to MacJournal. I’ve read some reviews, and generally the software receives good ratings. Some users think that the new version is bloated with unnecessary features and a hefty price tag ($35), but perhaps those users were looking for personal journaling and not blogging software. We’ll see. I’m composing in MacJournal now, and haven’t tried to publish yet. There may be snags in posting to my existing (though oft ignored) blog. May have to start a new one. I’ll post soon on how that goes, but I suppose if anyone’s reading this then the posting process happened eventually. :-)
iWeb is a beautiful LOOKING program, but using the templates seemed pretty clunky and formatting often screwed up when trying to substitute my own pictures for the template place holders. Also, the templates are designed to be very personal, having spots for age, major, location, etc. and seemed to really promote the journaling aspect of blogging above other genres and uses. I love Apple’s hardware and software generally speaking, but iWeb didn’t impress me. Also, a MAJOR drawback was that iWeb is pretty much designed to be used exclusively with .mac. It says that using an ftp client users can publish to a folder and then upload to their own hosting site, but the help menus don’t offer any more support than that. It seems pretty useless without a .mac account.
So that brings us to MacJournal. I’ve read some reviews, and generally the software receives good ratings. Some users think that the new version is bloated with unnecessary features and a hefty price tag ($35), but perhaps those users were looking for personal journaling and not blogging software. We’ll see. I’m composing in MacJournal now, and haven’t tried to publish yet. There may be snags in posting to my existing (though oft ignored) blog. May have to start a new one. I’ll post soon on how that goes, but I suppose if anyone’s reading this then the posting process happened eventually. :-)
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