Apple to End .Mac HomePage July 7th

Apple will be discontinuing its .Mac HomePage feature on July 7th, 2009, according to notification the company began sending out to MobileMe/.Mac customers.

"As of this date, you will no longer be able to create new pages or edit existing pages using HomePage," the company said in an e-mail. "Any pages you've already published will remain live at their current web address for as long as you like. If you need to make changes to your existing pages, please do so before July 7th."

HomePage was one of the flagship features of .Mac, allowing customers to create Web pages online through a series of templates. Customers could publish photo galleries, information, and links to files that were saved to iDisk. HomePage was one of the features not moved to Me.com when Apple rebranded the service as MobileMe.

In the e-mail, Apple is instead steering customers towards MobileMe Gallery for photo-sharing, and the use of iWeb to create Web sites that can then be published to Me.com.

To emphasize, page created through July 7th will remain available, but users will not be able to edit them or create new pages through HomePage after that date. As pointed out in the comments below, you will be able to edit them by directly manipulating the HTML files hosted in your "Sites" directory on your iDisk.