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We're less than a week out from the premiere of the mighty Spoon Millionaires, and Spoon-mentum™ just keeps on a building. At least, it does in my head. I've got some friends going, and some family, but enough to fill the seats? No. I'll have to rely on the good citizens of Lima, Ohio, for that, as well as friends and families of the cast members. Note to theater directors by the way: Don't be put off by large casts. Yes, rehearsals may be a bitch, but the larger the cast, the more friend/family butts you put in seats. It's not like you're paying anyone to be in the show, anyway. Hell, apparently many of you are charging the authors to see their own play.

What I'd like is to fill those seats with critics. Critics have the best job in the world; they get to see/read/hear/eat stuff for free, and then get paid to explain why it all sucks. This causes them to lose friends, because they inevitably take their work home with them and start criticizing everything under the falsehood that people actually care to hear their opinion, which in turn makes them bitter...but not as bitter as teachers, who, unfortunately, have been relegated by the Bush administration to be nothing more than government controlled critics. You show me a teacher who's happy with George W. Bush and I'll show you this guy I once knew who liked to give himself wedgies.

But anyway, critics. Good reviews, bad reviews, it's important to be reviewed. It shows you were at least worth bothering with. Jim (my co-author) and I know we have to get them there, but how to generate interest? Send them invitations? Send them our postcard? Call? No. The web.

The beauty of the web is that, for a nominal feel, you can do whatever you want with it. For example, Jim and I had the idea of releasing multiple postcards that parody one-sheet movie posters from the 80s. No way we could afford to print multiple designs, though, so that idea went on the web. But, to get to the point, Jim wanted to do a production blog. The idea amused me, because Jim lives in southern Florida and the show's being produced in mid-west Ohio. What does Jim know about the production of the play? Nothing, and that would make it so interesting...have to find something else to talk about.

Jim has another blog running called What if Steamboat Beat Hogan? It's a WWF counterfactual over at Blogspot. It generates more traffic than you'd think, I assure you. So, if a wildly amusing, deeply personal and politically dangerous blog will keep theater critics at our site a bit longer than otherwise, then yes, keep on blogging until the NSA or Jeremy Piven's camp shut us down. I decided I could use Jim's blog as opportunity to try out iWeb's blogging features, so I asked him to just send the stuff to me. Unfortunately, Jim's on a PC, or I would've just had him post the blog to my .mac account, but that would've changed anyway, as you'll see.

iWeb is an absolutely wonderful but terribly frustrating tool...at least to a web designer such as myself. I'm amazed at how easy it makes everything, but you have to be willing to play by Apple's rules. When I tried to set up an iWeb site with the initial version, the first thing I did was start to tweak the elements of the template I chose: That typeface is too large—make it smaller; it's too light—make it darker; no one has Helvetica Neue—switch to Helvetica; I need more separation between the content page and the browser background—change the color. iWeb lets you do all of this, but only one page at a time. Alter one page, and you have to manually alter them all. Create a new page, and you must remember everything you did to the others in order to match up the new one. Is there a way to automate this? I don't know. If I want to spend the time to figure that out, I may as well just design the site in Dreamweaver.

I abandoned that site a while back, but I wanted to return to iWeb for Jim's production blog. To do so, I just had to keep reminding myself that I wouldn't change a thing in Apple's templates. They're not bad looking, really. I mean, have you seen the FrontPage templates? Eegads, does no one in Redmond understand color and spatial relationships? Have they never looked at...you know...anything? Ever?

Knowing I would change little, I must've spent an hour trying out different iWeb templates. I wanted to see how the launching page looked. How an entry would look. I tried inserting graphics to see how the archive feature handled them. I switched back and forth a dozen times, and ultimately landed on the most basic one I could find. It's not the snazziest, but it's black/white/gray design wouldn't interfere with anything else I added, and, with one simple tweak (a background texture), I could easily tie it in with the main site's design.

Something to remember here is that once you choose your template, there's no turning back. Switching templates means starting over again; you can't transfer your content between templates. This is unfortunate, as I started the design with iWeb 1, and I now have access to all of the new templates in iWeb 1.1. Are they any better? I don't know. I won't look at them for fear of realizing I should've waited and gone with something else. When the show's done, I'll give them another look.

What makes iWeb so great is that it automates everything except for content. Navigation links are created automatically. Archives are updated automatically. It's a wonderful thing. After setting up your blog's home page, you add an entry by simply clicking a button. A template is thrown in place, and when you click in the text box to change your title, the title is made your page title and it's read by the home page and archive page. Your sample graphic (which is required in my template, unless I want some shot of this person snowboarding) is also carried over to the home page and archive, and is resized properly. The first few lines of text appear along with the photo, and you can control how much shows up.

If your template has a default photo in place, you simply need to drag another over top of it to replace it. I recommend learning the size of the default graphic (select the graphic then click on the ruler in the Inspector window) and sizing your new one to match. This keeps the pages clean and uniform throughout the site, and that's more important to readers than you may think. The default photo in my template is 400x300, so I simply made sure that any graphic I placed there was first sized to 400x300 pixels at 72 dpi. Simple and clean.

To change the background, I simply launched the Inspector window (good idea to always keep this open) and selected "Page Inspector." At the bottom of this window is a Browser Background drop-down menu. Select "Image Fill," click the Choose button and find your graphic. Done. My background is a repeating pattern, so I set it to Tile. You can, however, have the graphic appear just once at its original size if your design calls for it.

After that, it was just a matter of copying Jim's text into each entry. This meant reformatting the font to the iWeb template default (in this case, Arial size 15), which isn't a big deal. Unfortunately, with Jim writing the blog in Microsoft Word on the PC, me opening it in Nisus Writer Express for Mac OS X and copying and pasting it into iWeb, strange things would happen. Some quotes were "curly" while others were "straight." Line height and justification would change arbitrarily throughout, and bulleted and numbered lists completely lost their formatting. Also, iWeb's search and replace feature isn't very sophisticated. Jim has this bad habit of still putting two spaces after a period at the end of a sentence, and I couldn't have iWeb search for two spaces and replace them with one.

Photos aren't hard to work with. Of course, there's tight integration with iPhoto, but I still chose the "Choose..." command in the Insert menu because I preferred to first crop, resize and correct the photos in Photoshop to get them ready for the web. Working with graphics is tricky on the web, and I'm entirely convinced that iWeb knows how to do it. I'll take a look at that in a review or how-to article down the road.

The last procedure I'll mention here is the ability to link to other pages both within and outside your site, as this is obviously very important. For linking outside, you simply copy the URL you want, highlight the text that will contain the link, click the Link button in the Inspector window, and check the "Enable as a hyperlink" box. iWeb will automatically place your copied text in the link field if it's an external link. If you select "One of My Pages," you'll be presented with the page titles of all your blog entries and can simply select the one you want. "A File" opens a window for you to find the appropriate file on your hard drive (iWeb will automatically upload all linked files when you publish), and selected "An Email Message" allows you to enter both the e-mail address to which the message should be sent as well as the subject line to appear with the e-mail. Very nice.

The problem with iWeb's blog feature is determining how to publish it. If you have a .mac account, you can publish it directly. This is handy, as iWeb knows what's been changed and only publishes new and changed content. The drawback is that you get a ridiculously complicated URL. For instance, the URL of Jim's blog (until I abandoned this procedure) was web.mac.com/khiner/iWeb/Spoon/Blog/Blog.html. Not exactly the type of thing you'd want to put on a promotional flyer. Plus, the RSS feed wouldn't work. Apparently, because of the hierarchy by which iWeb places and refers to files, things need to be named a specific way in order for the RSS feed to be able to find what it's looking for (at press time there were 500 messages on this topic in the Apple Support Discussion forums). Ironically, the only way I could get the RSS to work was by using the method Apples doesn't recommend; publishing the web to a folder and then uploading it manually. The main benefit here is that I was able to keep it at my spoonmillionaires.com domain. Also by properly naming my folders and specifying the domain to which the blog was being published (which I only had to do once, not each time I uploaded a new blog), I was able to get the RSS to work at the http://www.spoonmillionaires.com/Spoon/Blog/Blog.html address, which is still ugly, but at least relevant to the full website. The big drawback, however, is that unless you want to dig through countless folders, subfolders, sub-subfolder, etc. to find exactly what's been updated each time to you write a new entry, you'll have to publish the entire blog every time you update it. Obviously, as the number of entries grows, this can take a long, long time. Does Dreamweaver have a way of comparing files in a folder and only uploading the new ones? I'll have to look into that.

Anyway, more on all of this later in a review or how-to article. Right now, I'll end this entry with the report that Jim's blog is easily the most popular feature of the site. More people read his blog than actually visit the site, which either illustrates the popularity and usefulness of blogs, or indicates that the site I designed really sucks and that people hate me and wish I'd just turn the whole project over to Jim. I hope it's the former, because my next entry will talk about our usage of Keynote, of all things to give our readers one more thing to see at the website. If you want to be prepared for class, you can see the Keynote presentation at our marketing page, which...cripes. I just noticed a typo on that page. I hope I have it corrected by the time you go there.

Back to myMovie.