RapidWeaver
How I made this site
Jun 22, 2008 Filed in: This Site
I created this website using RapidWeaver 4, from Realmac Software, and CSSEdit, from MacRabbit software. I previously used GoLive, from Adobe, but had grown frustrated with it. I tried Dreamweaver, also from Adobe, but found its interface too complicated. Later on I tried iWeb, from Apple, but found it too limited. RapidWeaver offers a great combination of handholding and flexibility, and generates web pages automatically from individual blog entries. Although the blog format is not exactly what I want, it works well enough and offers lots of benefits. Most importantly, using CSSEdit I was able to modify the site template (included with RapidWeaver) to suit my own needs.
When I went on the econ job market in 2003-2004, I created my online resume website using Adobe GoLive. I wanted a simple design that looked professional without being slick or pretentious. It also had to be easy for people to find and download my papers. I had used GoLive for a few years at that time for some personal projects that were definitely more pretentious and hopefully more slick, but I found that GoLive didn’t work particularly well for my text-heavy resume. I ended up using the source code editor view almost exclusively, since the page layout view made it too difficult to move different pieces around without messing up the div tags.
I stuck with GoLive until recently just because I didn’t have any other good alternatives. About a year ago, Adobe announced that GoLive would be deprecated in favor of Dreamweaver. I tried Dreamweaver out, but found its interface completely impenetrable. What’s more, both GoLive and Dreamweaver are complicated development environments where the user is supposed to have a complete and detailed understanding of every aspect of web page design. I am not a real web designer, nor do I have the time to become one. I just want a website that looks nice and does what I need it to. (Real web designers may want to look at Coda, from Panic.)
Having given up on Dreamweaver, I took a look at Apple’s iWeb program. iWeb comes with lots of templates, and just needs you to fill in the blanks with your content. I thought the blog module was particularly nice, since all you need to do is write your blog posts and store them in iWeb’s database; iWeb will then generate the blog website for you. I began to realize that what I really need is a way to automatically generate a web site from a database of my papers. In this paradigm, I would design the website once, and then just add or update each paper as I progressed in my research. I created an entire website offline in iWeb in just a day; this was a revelation compared to GoLive.
Unfortunately, iWeb turned out to be far too limited for my purposes. The blog posts look ugly if the post title runs over to a second line, unless I retouch each post by hand. I also can’t edit the templates. There is no way to organize blog posts by category.
I started looking for an alternative, and found good reviews for RapidWeaver. Since version 4 would soon be released, I bided my time. When version 4 finally came out about a month ago, I downloaded it and got to work. RapidWeaver works a lot like iWeb, but with a lot more flexibility. Like iWeb, RapidWeaver comes with a variety of themes, but there are lots more options to play with. It handles both categories and tags, which I think will be really helpful when I have more papers. Even better, I can edit the themes directly (I already had to learn the rudiments of HTML and CSS when I used GoLive).
I played around with the themes for a while, and settled on this one, which is my own modified version of “Caribou.” Based on the recommendation of Real Mac Software, I bought CSSEdit to make these modifications. It’s not that CSS code is hard to write; it’s just nice to have an editor that is aware of the syntax, as well as a user interface that makes all of the CSS properties available so I don’t have to look them up on the web.
In the end, RapidWeaver still isn’t quite ideal for what I want to do, but I think I’ve managed to fit most of what I wanted to do into RapidWeaver’s blog paradigm. I highly recommend RapidWeaver for anyone who can fit their web page into the paradigm of a blog, is willing to work with preformatted templates, and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time.
Summary
When I went on the econ job market in 2003-2004, I created my online resume website using Adobe GoLive. I wanted a simple design that looked professional without being slick or pretentious. It also had to be easy for people to find and download my papers. I had used GoLive for a few years at that time for some personal projects that were definitely more pretentious and hopefully more slick, but I found that GoLive didn’t work particularly well for my text-heavy resume. I ended up using the source code editor view almost exclusively, since the page layout view made it too difficult to move different pieces around without messing up the div tags.
I stuck with GoLive until recently just because I didn’t have any other good alternatives. About a year ago, Adobe announced that GoLive would be deprecated in favor of Dreamweaver. I tried Dreamweaver out, but found its interface completely impenetrable. What’s more, both GoLive and Dreamweaver are complicated development environments where the user is supposed to have a complete and detailed understanding of every aspect of web page design. I am not a real web designer, nor do I have the time to become one. I just want a website that looks nice and does what I need it to. (Real web designers may want to look at Coda, from Panic.)
Having given up on Dreamweaver, I took a look at Apple’s iWeb program. iWeb comes with lots of templates, and just needs you to fill in the blanks with your content. I thought the blog module was particularly nice, since all you need to do is write your blog posts and store them in iWeb’s database; iWeb will then generate the blog website for you. I began to realize that what I really need is a way to automatically generate a web site from a database of my papers. In this paradigm, I would design the website once, and then just add or update each paper as I progressed in my research. I created an entire website offline in iWeb in just a day; this was a revelation compared to GoLive.
Unfortunately, iWeb turned out to be far too limited for my purposes. The blog posts look ugly if the post title runs over to a second line, unless I retouch each post by hand. I also can’t edit the templates. There is no way to organize blog posts by category.
I started looking for an alternative, and found good reviews for RapidWeaver. Since version 4 would soon be released, I bided my time. When version 4 finally came out about a month ago, I downloaded it and got to work. RapidWeaver works a lot like iWeb, but with a lot more flexibility. Like iWeb, RapidWeaver comes with a variety of themes, but there are lots more options to play with. It handles both categories and tags, which I think will be really helpful when I have more papers. Even better, I can edit the themes directly (I already had to learn the rudiments of HTML and CSS when I used GoLive).
I played around with the themes for a while, and settled on this one, which is my own modified version of “Caribou.” Based on the recommendation of Real Mac Software, I bought CSSEdit to make these modifications. It’s not that CSS code is hard to write; it’s just nice to have an editor that is aware of the syntax, as well as a user interface that makes all of the CSS properties available so I don’t have to look them up on the web.
In the end, RapidWeaver still isn’t quite ideal for what I want to do, but I think I’ve managed to fit most of what I wanted to do into RapidWeaver’s blog paradigm. I highly recommend RapidWeaver for anyone who can fit their web page into the paradigm of a blog, is willing to work with preformatted templates, and doesn’t want to spend a lot of time.
Summary
- RapidWeaver 4 is a great way to generate a powerful, good looking website, especially in a blog format
- CSSEdit is a convenient way to modify RapidWeaver templates
- iWeb is fun but not very flexible
- GoLive is outdated, complicated to use, and makes it too easy to write bad code
- Dreamweaver is poorly designed and complicated to use