.Mac/iWeb ‘08 Personal Domain Support Fails…

Obviously now, being the Apple whore I am I had to get iLife ‘08 and enjoy the now 10gigs in my .Mac account. Even better is the personal domain support that’s going to be easy in iWeb ‘08 (even thinking of moving this blog to iWeb…just because I could)…or maybe not.

So I went to look at what it takes to setup iWeb ‘08 to publish to a personal domain, and am either frustrated, or just annoyed at how the support was implemented. You can’t have it upload to your current website. You can’t setup an FTP to upload to. What can you do?

Well, you click on the handy “Set Up Personal Domain” option in the File menu of iWeb, and it takes you to .Mac. You enter your domain, and all is well so far (though why do I need .Mac to publish to my personal domain?). Well the answer’s obvious - because they don’t want you uploading to your server - they want you to pay to use theirs! Even worse, once you punch in your domain, this is what you see:

What's a CNAME?

Now that makes perfect sense to me…I get the concept of A records, and CNAME records and what not…but is that really Apple’s target market for iWeb users? People who have setup BIND or other DNS servers in the past? Aren’t the same people who know what a CNAME is, the same people who would likely have their own hosting already?

And this doesn’t even bring up the fact that if you have a DNS server that you can edit to set up a CNAME record, don’t you probably already have a web server you can use?

I’m sorry…but Apple, you failed on this one…