iWeb? Maybe next year

So MacWorld San Francisco is upon us, and rumors are flying about new products from tablet computers to telephones to terrific new software. Me, I'm just hoping they improve the blogging features in iLife. I just bought iLife '06 because of the claims that iWeb, one of its components, could be used for blogs; hopefully, if that's more true of iWeb '07 than it was of iWeb '06, I'll be able to get a free (or at least discounted) upgrade.

Here's one glaring example of how insanely great iWeb isn't: let's say you create a blog and call it "Cheeseburger Soup." The main page of the blog comes from a template file, which by default has a big headline reading "My Blog." You can change it pretty easily to read "Cheeseburger Soup," but that doesn't change what shows up on the individual pages for your entries. Instead, every new entry gets a page with "My Blog" at the top. And every time you post to your blog, you have to override that. It's all determined by the template, which is written in XML and not designed for manual editing. Sure, you can change the template if you want to wade through a huge amount of XML - but that's about as simple and straightforward as trying to redecorate your living room by hiring a blind painter and giving him written instructions in classical Greek.

Apple is supposed to be the company that makes things easy. The whole point of blogging is to make it easy to maintain an online journal. Hopefully Apple will see the light and make it a little easier to blog with the iWeb in iLife '07 than it is with the iWeb in iLife '06. In the meantime, I've come back to Blogger.

Take me back to Random Canyon!

I have no idea what is going to go into this blog, but let's start with a snippet of the song after which it is named. I first heard the tune in a coffeehouse in Louisville, Kentucky. The guy who sang it credited it to Dave van Ronk - who indeed has recorded it, but as it turns out, did not write it. It was penned by Peter Stampfel, who also recorded the song with the Holy Modal Rounders.

I sang the song for years while doing bar gigs in Louisville. It is a pleasantly insane piece of work; although I have never heard van Ronk's version, I can imagine that he sang it a lot like Mike Potter taught it to me back at the Oval Door. The first verse goes like this:

Take me back to Random Canyon,
Where the gryphon's always riffin'
And the unicorn is horny in the spring;
Where the crystal coyote crawls
Over sleepy garden walls,
And the wireless wombat wanders on the wing...

I've long been a fan of the Holy Modal Rounders and I knew they had recorded the song, but not until I was researching this post did I realize that theirs was the original. I'm gonna write Stampfel and see if I can get his permission to post the full lyrics on here.

Anyway, the name appealed to me because of the anticipated randomness of topics I expect to cover, and because it is an obscure musical reference to a really clever song.