Yesterday I made two minor changes to both the music page and the “about this music” page using Dreamweaver. Nothing complicated, and nothing that hasn’t been done before to these pages. They display perfectly fine using Safari and even my old version of IE 5. But under FireFox, each of these two pages are being interpreted as either a Web application (the music page) or as a binary (the “about” page). I have no idea if this is a DreamWeaver issue or an Apple iDisk issue (since these pages are served from my iDisk, and we all know how screwed up Apple’s servers have been lately). The HTML code generated by DreamWeaver looks fine, and again, the changes were minor text additions, that’s it. I suspect it’s an iDisk issue, but only with these two pages that were edited yesterday. My unedited pages load fine in Firefox. Oh, and I doubt it’s a Firefox issue. 

I’m investigating, but am truly stumped. I’ve already heard from one person who found the same behavior when going to my music page, and I can bet that he was using Firefox. Hoping to get this issue fixed, but I need to understand what the cause is before doing that. Sorry for any inconvenience to those trying to access my music using Firefox. If anyone has any thoughts, I’d be most appreciative if you post them to the comments.

UPDATE: I suspect the issue may have something to do with the fact that I used the online MobileMe uploader for both files after adding in the new text with DreamWeaver. The files now load perfectly on Firefox after I went ahead and used PathFinder to open up my iDisk (I could have used the Finder as well, but like PF better in many ways), and then opened up the files on the server using TextWrangler. I just saved the files as themselves, overwriting the file on the server and that took care of the problem. Somehow I think the upload process on the Web corrupted whatever server-side processing is needed to have the file recognized as a pure HTML file rather than as a binary. No idea why the issue only manifests itself when the pages are loaded in Firefox, but I’m at least glad it’s fixed. For now, I’m going back to using just TextWrangler for any minor text edits, since I don’t know that the issue wasn’t with how DreamWeaver saved the files (although that’s easy enough to test), and not using the relatively fast Web-based iDisk for uploads of HTML pages.

UPDATE 2: Yup, it’s the online MobileMe upload process, not Dreamweaver. Now, if I could just find a decent way to inform Apple of their bug…

Like many folks, I’ve had it up to here with Apple’s new MobileMe service, which is really the long-time .mac on anti-steroids. At this point, I use it to serve my Web site (but not this blog), and my music site, and I do have a .mac e-mail address (sorry, but the thought of a ‘me.com’ e-mail domain is untenable; I’m keeping it as .mac). Anyway, I don’t use push for contacts or calendar entries, and it seems that others feel the same way. The service is just too unreliable. After a ton of work and literally two hours on the phone with Apple last week, my contacts and calendar entries sync again pretty quickly with my iPhone via USB, and that’s fine with me (no need for the cloud, IMHO).

But now I’m having issues with sending e-mail. It just started this evening, both for me and Debbie (we both have .mac accounts). I ended up sending out my personal e-mail using my work domain, since that functioned just fine. In any case, looking at Apple’s Discussion Forums, lots of people are having the same issue. But there’s an easy fix: change the SMTP port from 25 to 587, and if one hasn’t done so already, require authentication for SMTP (which is what I use by default). That works. Of course, it’s ridiculous that this should suddenly happen on a Friday night, and that I had to find this out by combing through the Web. I kinda doubt it’s an ISP issue. I’m somewhat locked into MobileMe(ss) for now, since beside changing e-mail, it would be cumbersome to download all my iDisk files and dump them onto a dedicated domain. But it’s also very tempting (and probably much cheaper). When I’m hearing people write of Apple as “Crapple” or of MobileMe as “MobileMess,” Apple would seem to have a pretty significant PR problem that they need to address faster and better than they have with just blogging about it and offering a one-month extension of service (which amounts to just over $8 in credit—thanks very much!).