Moving from Rapidweaver to a PC Web Site Creation Tool, any help would be appreciated! MacPro 4,1 EOL, so time to move to PC.

So if you have been reading my posts you know that my MacPro is nearing the end of it’s life. The next version of OS X, macOS Sierra, officially does not support my MacPro 4,1. Now it does support the MacPro 5,1, and I can do a firmware flash and make my Mac think it is a 5,1, since the only different was a firmware upgrade and newer processors. So I will be able to Install Sierra, but the writing is on the wall and Sierra will likely be the last OS to support a 5,1 MacPro.

And it is not like I have a stock 4,1, it has an SSD, an NVIDIA GTX 670 with 4GB of RAM, and a ton of Hard drives, but the big issue is that Adobe Creative Cloud big updates tend to only work with the latest Mac Upgrade so my MacPro has maybe a year or at best 2 before it can no longer get OS upgrades, and will literally be a paperweight. Sure I can still run it for some things, but it won’t be getting security upgrades, and software will stop working on it.

Now for most software I can easily move it to a PC, or if not easily it can at least be done. I can resave all my Pages files to word docs, and things like that, but for Web Site Creation it is not so Easy.

I run Rapidweaver 6 for web site creation. I used to make my own web sites in HTM, and have run many many programs from Net Objects Fusion when it was Mac, to Dreamweaver, but I don’t want to code anymore, as basically when the web moved heavily to CSS I moved to WYSIWYG completely and gave up on coding for the most part.

So now I run RapidWeaver 6 (I know 7 is out, but do I really want to upgrade, when in the next few years I will be likely be moving to windows? Not really!) and do my 2 web sites, as well as my mom’s web site for her business.

Of course RapidWeaver is unfortunately Mac only. So the question becomes what to rebuild my web sites in that would work on a PC. The obvious choices are not so obvious.

I already run Adobe Creative Cloud, so Dreamweaver makes sense if I wanted to code HTML, but I don’t.

So I recently took a look at Adobe Muse, it’s WYSIWYG web creation tool, that was created not by the Dreamweaver team, but by the Indesign team. And MUSE looks fantastic and powerful, except for one major thing, BLOGS!

And it is blogs that hurt the whole equation! I have one local WordPress Blog, my Movie review blog, and 4 google blogger blogs. Now I know that not having a blog local means that it won’t show up in search for the site, though I get around this in RapidWeaver by user the Loghound SiteMap plug in, which scans all of your blog entries and gives them local entries in your siteindex.xml. And honestly if I had to I could move all those Blogger blogs to local WordPress blogs, to have all the entries show up as local pages, but even that doesn’t help with Adobe Muse.

With Adobe Muse, there are no blogs. Sure a few third party plug ins have been made to make local blogs, and you can show blog entries from RSS, but there is literally no way to show your whole blog. Not even a local WordPress blog! And it sounds like even if they do it will have to be blog posted on Adobe Business Catalyst and not on your own hosted web site.

If Adobe would let you use locally published WordPress Blogs I would be fine, and could move my Blogger blogs to their own WordPress blogs, and publish locally, but that doesn’t sound like it will happen.

And so the point of this point, to ask, does anyone have a solution for me. The best solution would be a cross platform WYSIWYG solution that lets me remake my sites on my mac before I move to PC, and lets me integrate my WordPress and Blogger blogs into the site easily. Now I could also go for a PC Only solution, and run it in either Bootcamp or Parallels ( I currently have both, so I can do that), but then I need a powerful WYSIWG web site editor that can incorporate outsite and local blogs, and is something like Rapidweaver.

Any input would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

More on the site update

So yes I have done a major update to the site so it works on mobile devices from phones, to tablets and to desktop web browsers. It will even change on a tablet in landscape or portrait mode.

I do still plan to do more with the backgrounds and the like as I get some time.

I have also updated the The Misadventures of Bear page and the The Foam Hedz page, and they are unfortunately no longer working as podcasts on iTunes (I pretty much couldn’t get it to work in Rapidweaver 6 like it did in 5) and you can subscribe via the RSS feeds in the sidebar for each page.

Just updated the site

The site has a new look, and totally different feel, and I eventually plan on doing the same to Whale of a Tale as well.

Mostly this was because the new google search policy downplays sites that don’t play well with mobile browsers, and this new look should do just that.

I don’t have it as customized as I would like, and I had to lose my old banners, but overall I think it looks pretty nice.

creatica

creattica-shrunk

I just found creatica, an excellent web site for you artists out there. Not only does it link to inspirational design, but it includes links to free templates, textures, patterns, css.

This site is very cool, and worth checking out.