Using iWeb to post to servers other than .Mac

I love iweb and the whole Ilife pack. There is a little lack on the webpage if your not a .mac subscriber. I redid my webpage in 5 minuets and played with some of the features. They say the hit counter wont work with out dot mac. My slide show worked on my windows machine. Feel free to check my site keep in mind I was just testing some stuff so it will change but I give iWeb an a+ for easy and looks good.

It's worth checking out RapidWeaver; far superior product to iWeb.

Perhaps rsync could be used to synchronize local and remote web pages. This way only the differences in the files would automatically be transferred to the server. I don't know how iWeb is transferring or synchronizing files with .Mac but if it had an internal FTP functionality it should also provide a way to upload only the modified files or items to the server. I thik that othervice small changes to larger projects would have too much overhead.

FTP needs to go away. SFTP is a more secure choice. I feel that WebDAV over SSL is the best for this sort of thing though since not only is your password and data not being sent in the clear (also true with SFTP), you can simply mount the location as a drive. You can also easily set a seperate password for WebDAV access which, depending on how careful you are, is useful for keeping your shell access seperate from your web folder access.

If your host/server supports WebDAV, then just mount that location through the finder and save the output directly to your site.

If you run Apache as your web server, mod_dav is very easy to set up. SSL is also fairly easy to set up, especially if you use CACert.org (and their docs) to grab a free web cert for your domain.

Whats FTP? But seriously, theres long been a need for a drag'n'drop desktop web creator that hides all that programming bollocks. Ive been a designer for 10 years and I wont touch website design (professionaly) until there is software that "just works" without having to go and learn some alien coding language. For me its like trying to design by writing postscript code. Iweb is not the app im looking yet for but its a step forward.

iWeb does work outside of dotMac, just save to folder and FTP it to your server. iWeb does inform you of the items that won't work i.e. counter and enhanced slideshow. I didn't try the blog page to see if that's a problem, I'll check and post the results.

FTP? What is this the 70's? How about ssh/scp? I realize FTP is still useful and still in heavy use. But the extra authentication options you get with ssh/scp make a strong case (read ssh-agent public/private key authentication). And while we're at it, why not webdav? It's good enough for .mac...

iWeb appears to be a bridge between iLife and .Mac, and and decidedly lacking in functionality without both of them.

I'm surprised there isn't a bundle deal with iLife and .Mac, really - or that iWeb doesn't come as part of .Mac.

But ultimately, I wonder who the market is for .Mac. Do mom and dad really want to share a bunch of stuff with people on the internet, and pay annually for the privilege? Apple had better hope they do, because anyone with a bit of web savvy can do most of .Mac much cheaper via GMail et al.

Just watching Steve introduces it @ the keynote makes me wanna order a copy already ! 3 things are holding me back from clicking on that "BUY NOW" button tho -

1. Are non-.mac members allowed to post comments on blogs generated by iWeb? Or, is the commenting function included at all?

2. How about the codes that it generates? I hope it's not gonna be as crappy as FrontPage...

3. Can the templates be easily modified using CSS?

I would really, really like to switch to iWeb....

I have Panic's Transmit to do the FTPing so hopefully it lets me spit everything out to a local folder in iWeb. I ordered it so I'll let you know when I get it.