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Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
I recently got an e-mail from Apple (text below). I have been trying to find out whether my website at http://homepage.mac.com/trevorhewson will cease to be accessible via this address after November 8th. A live chat via the Express Lane MobileMe support facility didn't really clarify anything.

My website is published to the Sites folder of my iDisk (not the Sites folder in the Web folder) and was not created with Homepage. The FAQ referred to for people with third party published material pre-dates this e-mail and seems to be based on the previous situation when Apple withdrew the Homepage publishing facility but promised that pages already created would remain viewable. They have clearly changed their mind on that but not updated the FAQ, hence my confusion. Moving my website to ..Web/Sites is doable (but non-trivial) but will break all links to my site from elsewhere on the web so I don't want to leap into doing this if it will continue to be accessible where it is.

Any views?

Trevor

Text of Apple's e-mail: ".Mac HomePage viewing will be discontinued on November 8, 2010


Dear MobileMe member,

Over a year ago, we retired the .Mac HomePage application for publishing new pages, but allowed previously published pages to remain viewable on the web. On November 8, 2010, we will discontinue online viewing of photos, movies, and files shared using .Mac HomePage.

Please note that your content will not be deleted. Any photos, movies, or files you have published using HomePage will continue to remain on your MobileMe iDisk in the Movies, Pictures, or Public folders. We recommend MobileMe Gallery as a great way to share photos and movies on the web. Please read these instructions on how to move your HomePage photos and movies to MobileMe Gallery.

MobileMe members who have published web pages using iWeb will not be affected by this change. If you have used other software to publish web content to MobileMe or .Mac, or have questions about this change, please read this FAQ.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. Thank you for being a MobileMe member.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team"

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Just checking the hyperlinks in the above posting, I see that the FAQ has now been updated. I would still be interested in how others interpret it though!

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Gordon Clyne
My suggestion is to take the content from your iDisk and re-flow it using iWeb for the me.com gallery instead. Once done, iWeb will ask you if you want to announce your site, and you should send that announcement to the people you believe were linking to your previous site with any hard links.
DNS and google search will update after a few hours or days and anyone searching for your site will likely get a "did you mean......" prompt.
Apple will take down the homepage site as their licence with the company the originally used to host, will expire as far as I am aware.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Gordon, I don't understand what you mean by "re-flow using iWeb". My site is mainly built using Freeway plus a large family tree. Re-building it would be a massive exercise and even re-uploading it to the web/sites folder (where it could be reached using a web.me.com address) would take several days because there are over a thousand files involved. There are also links to and from some iWeb-created pages and these would all have to be traced and repaired manually.

Can you elaborate on your last sentence please. I understand that pages constructed with the Homepage tool will no longer work but my question is will "taking down the homepage site" mean that other html documents in the Sites folder on my iDisk (which owe nothing to the Homepage tool) can no longer be accessed through a http://homepage.mac address? This is the question on which I couldn't get a 'yes', 'no', 'it depends' or even 'don't know' out of my chat session with Apple.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Gordon Clyne
Sorry trevor wasn't paying attention.... Homepage as a site is going to be taken down if it hasn't been already. So anything with a link to homepage.XXXXXXXX etc wont work.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Gordon. Well, November 8th has come and gone, and my website seems still to be working so it seems that third party -generated material using homepage.mac addresses do still work. The Apple info on this was very confusing but it seems that, as long as your pages don't refer to files in the other folders of your iDisk (i.e. outside of the Sites folder) they will be okay. The Homepage-generated pages called up images from the Pictures folder for example, which seems to be why they are affected.

Or... Apple just might not have implemented the change yet and I could be in a fool's paradise!

Trevor, still clinging on to http://homepage.mac.com/trevorhewson/home/

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Gordon Clyne
I asked my buddy who runs the dns services at apple, and he said they had internally postponed the shut off to an as yet undetermined date to let a few larger customers migrate stuff out.but you should go by the announced dates in case they pull the plug at any time.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Derek Wright
The images on my Homepage web sites has gone already.

This removal of a web site service solely for the benefit of Apple does not impress me at all - it reduces any confidence I have of the durability of the existing Apple web site service which I get as part of my MobileMe subscription.

I know of many private "public service" information web sites that were installed many years ago and that contain useful reference information eg fixing cars etc that are now in jeopardy. This action by Apple is akin to burning a library.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Derek, your images should still be in your Pictures folder on your iDisk. As I understand it, Apple has broken the mechanism by which they used to be referenced by html pages in the Sites folder.

Although my site is still working at the moment, I share your concerns and fear that it is only a matter of time before the homepage.mac addressing stops working altogether - how much longer will our .mac email addresses last, I wonder?

Either way, I think it is time to register a domain name. Now, I dimly remember Mick telling us how to do that a few meetings ago. . .

Trevor

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Mick Burrell
Hi Trevor, yes, I did cover it. You can buy them from companies like Easily http://www.easily.co.uk or FastHosts http://www.fasthosts.co.uk. Don't forget though that buying the domain name does not give you a host (somewhere to store the files) but if you buy hosting from one of these companies, they may throw in a domain name.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Mick. I was thinking of buying the domain name from Easily then setting it up as a Personal Domain Name on MobileMe. I will still have to transfer my Freeway-created material from the root Sites folder of my iDisk to the Web/Sites folder and install an index.html document in the Web/Sites folder to link to it. Then, with a bit of tinkering to stop iWeb from overwriting this index.html file, I think everything should be accessible via the domain name, with my domain name appearing in the individual page URLs so that people can bookmark individual pages if they wish.

And then Apple can do what they like with Homepage and the Sites folder.

Have I missed anything?

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Mick Burrell
Does your site not have an index.html file? That's pretty standard. Or when you give the link to the current location, does that point direct to a file?

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Yes, my site has an index.html file, however, main website will probably live in Web/Sites/Home but I don't think I can set up CNAME forwarding to go there directly. As I understand it I need to set up CNAME forwarding of my domain name to web.me.com which will go to the index.html file in the Web/Sites folder of my iDisk which is where iWeb puts an index.html file. If I have got this wrong, please do say so.

The tinkering I referred to is because, if I put the index.html file of my main website in Web/Sites, it will get overwritten whenever I modify my iWeb pages.

To get around this I have created a second iWeb site and moved it to the top of the side bar, so the first page of this site now forms the index.html file in Web/Sites so, as long as I never modify this second iWeb site again, hopefully iWeb won't upload the index.html page again so I can replace this file one to forward to Web/Sites/Home/. I tried this out yesterday and it looks promising.

Current situation is:
Main site: http://homepage.mac.com/trevorhewson which redirects to homepage.mac.com/trevorhewson/home/ (Note that this is in the root level Sites folder of the iDisk, not in Web/Sites.)
iWeb site: http://web.me.com/trevorhewson
Intended main site address http://www.DOMAINNAME (to forward to Web/Sites/Home).

My word, this stuff is so hard to explain clearly, no wonder I struggle to understand it!

Trevor

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Oops, I have been caught by my own trap! Having overwritten iWeb's index.html file, the second link in the previous post now forwards to my main site. To get to the iWeb material now needs http://web.me.com/trevorhewson/Site

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Mick Burrell
Sorry Trevor - I'm lost ;-)

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
I'm almost relieved to hear you say that Mick. Perhaps next time we meet, I'll draw you a picture!

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Gordon Clyne
Trevor,
Which Wamug do you go to?? Dorchester, b'mouth, or Salisbury? Ill be at the Salisbury one next I think, and I think I can help you fix this. But ill need to look at your pages for a while.

I think you need to do some arboreal trimming of your HTML tree and some branch rearrangements to get stuff pointed to/ from the right index pages.

Help me understand why you are having migration difficulty, it shouldn't be this hard..... So I don't think I've understood the bigger picture here. Why can't you use iWeb for all your sites and needs, and import your work?

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Hello Gordon,

Thanks for the kind offer. We try to go to the Bournemouth meetings as often as we can, and have been to Salisbury just the once.

Most of my site is built using Freeway and I don't know how to 'import' it into iWeb.

I have taken the first steps and registered a domain name. I am in the process of setting this up as a Personal Domain on MobileMe and just this moment discovered that everything in the iWeb sidebar has turned red, implying it needs to be re-published. Once this is all working, I plan to re-publish my Freeway material into Web/Sites/Home so it will sit alongside the iWeb stuff in Web/Sites/Site and be accessible via my domain name.

If there is a way of integrating the Freeway-generated pages more closely with iWeb, then I would certainly like to understand it.

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Gordon Clyne
Are we talking about dynamic content here? Does freeway create/manage and delete ad hoc pages in it's branches?

Re: Withdrawal of Homepage.mac service from MobileMe

Avatar Trevor Hewson
If dynamic content means pages created 'on the fly' then no, nothing so sophisticated.

I now seem to have got the domain name forwarding working after a fashion so http://bartonhewsons.me.uk, http://www.bartonhewsons.me.uk, www.bartonhewsons.me.uk and even bartonhewsons.me.uk all find their way to my home page. At least they do on Safari on my iMac - I'll get a few PC friends to check once all the material is uploaded. Gordon, if you want to see what sort of material is involved, the Modelflying/Electric Scale section is uploaded (other sections will follow over the next few days). Any page you see with 'home' in its address is created by Freeway, anything you see with 'Site' is by iWeb. However, for the moment, return links from iWeb-created pages will still take you to the Homepage incarnation of my site.
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