Apple HomePage

» see homepage.mac.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 8 November 2010 Apple switched off every page anyone had ever built with HomePage. Not the accounts and not the storage, just the pages: a decade of photo albums and resumes sitting at homepage.mac.com stopped answering on the same afternoon.

HomePage arrived on 5 January 2000 as one of the four free iTools Apple shipped alongside Mac OS 9, next to the mac.com address and the iDisk. Its pitch was ten minutes. Pick a template, drop in pictures you had already put in your iDisk Sites folder, hit publish, and Apple hosted the result under your own name. You could not write HTML into it, and that was the feature rather than the limitation.

The free part lasted two and a half years. On 17 July 2002 Apple folded iTools into .Mac and put the whole thing behind a ninety-nine dollar annual subscription. That was real money in Turkey that year, and it bought a convenience I had no use for: I was on a dial-up line writing the HTML myself, on a PC, and the number of Mac owners I knew personally was zero.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what you actually got ~

The template list is the giveaway. Photo Album, Movie Theater for an iMovie export, Invitations, Baby Announcements, Resume. Apple expanded the tool on 19 July 2000 with more designs and a little more freedom, but the shape never changed: fill in the blanks, do not move anything, do not add anything the template had not already anticipated.

The Sites folder on your iDisk was where the files lived, which meant the web page and the backup were the same object. Drag a picture into a folder on your desktop and a stranger could see it at an address with your name in it. Most of what replaced this made that relationship worse.

~ the two-year retirement ~

Apple announced the end in April 2009 and did it in stages. Editing stopped that July, so existing pages froze exactly as they were with nobody able to change a word. The notice promised that published pages would "remain live at their current web address for as long as you like", which turned out to mean sixteen months.

The 8 November 2010 cutoff took the pages down and ended online viewing of anything shared through HomePage. MobileMe outlived it by twenty months and shut on 30 June 2012. iCloud, the thing that replaced MobileMe, has never hosted a personal web page at all.

~ the address ~

For about ten years homepage.mac.com/yourname was one of the few personal web addresses that came with a real name attached instead of a member number. GeoCities gave you a neighborhood and a house number. Apple gave you the string you had already chosen for your email, which is a small thing that turns out to matter when you are handing the address to someone in person.

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