Impressions: iLife '09 - iWeb

iPhoto, GarageBand, and iMovie kind of stole the spotlight of iLife '09, but I'm looking forward  to iWeb as well.  Let's see what I can come up with.  

New Themes - a few too little, no?

There are only two new themes - Leaf Print and Fine Line.  Two?! Only?

As a blog tool - not so good

I hoped that they would improve the blogging functionality, but not much changes here.  The problem with using iWeb as a blog tool compared with Blogger is that iWeb creates each separate entry as a page.  Although you can change the layouts of the entries using a tepmplate feature, there seems to be no way to edit the individual components.  

So for each entry, I have to re-enter the title of my blog unless I want it to always show the default text like "My Blog."  

Luckily, they included an RSS widget, which means you can stream your blog to your iWeb site using RSS.  

YouTube Widgets

These are pretty easy to use.  Drag the widget to your page, and enter an YouTube URL.  Nice!  But I think they were here since last version.

Where are the iTunes widgets?

So it seems the My iTunes Widgets aren't in iWeb.  You have to get them through iTunes. 

FaceBook updates

This is a nifty feature.  It'll update my FaceBook profile when I publish or update the site.  I'm looking forward to integration like this for other services like Twitter.

The results and the verdict

So after playing around with an hour, here is what I have.  

It seems like iWeb has only gotten a minor update.  The RSS feed widget is a nice edition and the FaceBook update are what I like about it.  It still cannot really be used as a blogging software though it sure does have the potential to become one.