Low Cost Web Presence- Leaving Mobile Me Behind
I must admit I am an Apple product fanatic but I also love to save money and find the best deals out there. One of the big sales perks when I brought my iMac was .Mac. which is now known as Mobile Me. What was appealing about the service was that it had mac.com email, idisk remote file storage, web space, domain hosting, photo storage, calendars, and more. This seemed like a good idea and a good price at $99 per year of which I got a discount of $30 at my initial purchase. Now it is time to renew the $99 and as I consider if I want to renew, experience has taught me that I might not need to. While is it convenient to have all these in one place, convenience does not always mean necessary or the best deal. You are indeed paying for this convenience. While many of these tips can and should be used to create your own low cost PC or Mac web presence, here’s a break down of the big questions surrounding Mobile Me.
Why Mobile Me? “Best” if you have a Mac, are using the full suite of Mac products, and want a singular, one stop experience. You use the Mac email yourname@mac.com. You can use iweb software to create your site and publish it through your Mobile Me account. You can create and upload a blog through iweb and Mobile Me. You can publish photos and galleries for public viewing through your site. You can store and backup your files off site (off computer) through idisk. Finally, if you have a Mac, a PC at work, and an iphone you can use Mobile Me to sync all your mail, calendars and data.
What are your options? Even using a Mac and iweb, you can still create your website, but publish and host it through another company at a lower yearly cost (particularly if you pay a year up front). Store files on that hosted account or a one time purchase will get you an external hard drive much bigger than the 20GB of storage offered by Apple. You can upload and share pictures for free through Picasa and Flickr. Take advantage of free email through gmail. Create and promote a blog for free through Google or WordPress. None of this changes your mail applications on your iphone or imac.
How do you leave Mobile Me? You work backwards. But you must give yourself some time before the expiration date. This is where people get caught up. They don’t prepare and have fewer choices than to pay.
1. Email- forward all your new emails to a new address. Have the .mac account send all your old emails to the new address so you don’t lose them. Notify your friends of your new address in one email and put a signature on all outgoing emails that will say this. Change the email address on your accounts like facebook and twitter. Import your address book to your new account. See this link for great directives on all of these simple tasks.
2. Pictures- Open an account for Flickr or Picasa. As your original pictures should be on your computer through iphoto or in a PC file, you will need to upload them again. Lucky for you there is a bulk uploader tool. Set it up before you go to bed and rise to find all your pics in a new home. With iphone apps, you can still upload pics on the fly to your Flickr accounts.
3. Blog- Hopefully you are the kind of person who keeps drafts of your blogs in Word or Pages. Get your free blog account and repost them…or start from a new day with new blog entries. Post the change of address on your old site. Don’t be skittish about this. It’s a temporary thing. People will forget the change quickly as new content is published.
4. Website- create a redirect notice similar to what you did for your email. If you’re using your own domain name you can simply upload your iweb files to the new host and everything looks the same. If you used Mobile Me as your host, you’ll need to purchase a domain and refer everyone on your old site to the new address. You will still be able to upload the files. The only difference in this case will be a new domain name/address.
5. Files- Again, the originals should still be on your hard drive. Buy an external hard drive and place the files there. If in a money pinch, copy the files on a high capacity disk and store them in a safe place. You can load them on an external drive when you get one. In reality you should have multiple back up copies of important files anyway, so a high capacity disk backup is a good thing.
What about my iphone and syncing? You are still able to retrieve all your mail accounts on your iphone. They will still be updated. The convenience of auto updating is gone. Now you have to push the refresh button yourself! Whoa….. In addition, they won’t be is real time synched with your computer. Without Mobile Me this means if you are at your computer looking at your emails and delete some, on your iphone the deleted emails will still be there for you to manually trash or refresh until you have docked your iphone to that computer. In other words there is no instant synching of your email accounts. You will have to dock your phone to have them synch through the infamous Apple “cloud”. Same thing with calendars. Simply dock and get calendar changes made on your desktop. This is not worth $99 to me.
Since this instant synching became part of the iphone experience, I believe docking became less likely and people just recharged their phones through the outlets. Docking is important. Going days without docking your phone is not a good thing. Each time you dock, it backs up your phone. An invaluable safety measure should your phone ever crash. If you’ve been relying on the auto synch and not docking you probably have lots of precious data just waiting to be lost! When you sit down at your Mac or PC, just dock your iphone!
The bottom line Again, it’s about money and convenience. It does take time to do these tasks although none are very complicated. For the me-now- generation, it may be too time consuming to focus on. Once it’s done though, it’s done and there will really be nothing noticeable other than the change in your pocket. Which is the bigger trade off for you? Money or convenience?
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