a'tris blog: I Hate iWeb

So for the last two days straight - and I mean straight - I've been working on re-designing a'tris HQ. The guys and I have been wanting to overhaul the site for some time now but have just been utterly swamped trying to pay our bills and record our next album. The Lensing template always seemed a little under cooked to me. It continues to do its job well but I feel that it could be far more streamlined and polished.

Unfortunately I've recently come to learn that I am not the person to affect those changes. :)

Perhaps it's unfair of me to blame iWeb. It is not Apple's fault that I have absolutely no basic knowledge of HMTL. I should have picked up that skill set a long time ago. Alas, I did not. However it was, for that reason, that I - with much glee - upgraded to Apple's latest iLife suite of applications. I love Garageband and I now use it to help me plot each and every a'tris song, station ID, and an occasional singing telegram or two. iPhoto is AMAZING and it allows me to easily edit and sort my favorite photographs and I did all of a'tris' video blogs with iMovie. The promise of the new iWeb's ability to upload directly to an FTP server was a golden orb to me.

Sadly though it turned out to be a gold-painted tungsten one. Sure it's great if you use Apple's templates. Just click on the "Comic Book" option and you're good to go! But, if you're like me, and you want to build your own custom website when you see this app turn and run for your life. After finally managing to publish a copy of the new HQ to my desktop I was extremely disappointed to find that what had looked absolutely beautiful in the builder was completely screwed up in every single one of my browsers. Graphics were jumping all over the place. Text colors where wacky. Everything was off. I've tried and tried to fix it but nothing has seemed to work. Usually I'm up for a puzzle; if you have a killer cross-word bring it on! But today... I'm just burned out.

On a positive note, our friends DJ Meatwad and Paulie from Headcase Radio and Dibivegas respectively have been showing us a lot of love lately and we really appreciate their support.

Meatwad directed us to this cool banner (cut and paste HTML I can handle) when you get a chance give it a click to check out what he's doing!

Also make sure to to send Paulie a comment to request an a'tris tune or two ;) Here's how:

Go to podcastalley.com and enter DIGIVEGAS into the search field. Once his show pops up, click on DETAILS and then click on COMMENT.

Last but not least I've included some pictures of the website (as it properly appeared in iWeb) below. At the very least, we can all revel in the site that could have been together. If anyone would like to assist with this project please drop me a line; I'd be very, very happy to hand it over. If you are like me and don't know how to help - or don't have the time - that's perfectly cool too. Leave me some feedback and let me know what you think! I'm really hoping to make the new site simple, intuitive, and rich with frequently updated content. For example, in the upper right hand corner you'll notice a speech bubble which I successfully synched with the Twitter account we just created! On the homepage you'll see my blogs updated in real time and, on the photo page, you'll be able to view my snap shots almost as I take them from the road via an RSS feed. I really hope to get this up and running in the not too distant future and look forward to your thoughts!

Hope this finds you feeling healthy!

-Mason

From a'tris HQ