[WelMac] ILife 06

[David Empson]

At 9:00 AM +1300 3/3/2006, John Crook wrote:
>That was a good rundown on iLife '06 at Monday's meeting.  I was
>especially interested in iWeb which seems to offer a neat functionality
>for sharing photos and news with family and friends.  The user
>interface looks very much like that for iPage which I have been using
>for family newsletters (creating a pdf from the output for
>distribution).
>
>I'd be interested to hear if anyone has bought a copy of iLife '06, and
>how they are getting on with it, especially with iWeb.

I've been looking into it a little more since the meeting.

iWeb is fine if you have a .Mac account, but it needs more hand 
holding if you are going to use it with a web site hosted elsewhere.

You have to publish your web site to a folder. If your web server is 
on the same local area network and has file sharing set up 
appropriately, you could publish directly to the folder on the web 
server. If your web server is not local, you could do something like 
set up an FTP or WebDAV connection in Finder in order to be able to 
publish directly to the web server.

If you don't know how to do that, you need to publish to a folder on 
your hard drive, then use some other software to establish a 
connection to your web server and upload the files: typically an 
FTP/SFTP client such as Fetch or Transmit, or a WebDAV client 
(depending on the requirements of your web server).

No problem for the initial creation of the web site (just a little 
more work and added complexity).

The big problem: if you make any changes to the web site in iWeb and 
re-publish it, iWeb recreates all files for the entire web site, even 
those which didn't change from the last time you published it.

FTP client software typically offers a "mirror" or "synchronize" mode 
which works by comparing the  modification date and time of the local 
files and those on the server to work out whether they need to be 
copied. Since iWeb has rewritten everything, the synchronization mode 
will think every file has changed, so it will have to upload your 
entire web site again.

For a big web site and a relatively slow Internet connection, this 
could take a lot of time.

In order to improve this situation, we need either of the following:

(a) An update to iWeb which knows that it is republishing a web site 
to the same folder, and only rewrites changed files.

(b) A separate tool which does a content comparison of the files 
saved by iWeb with a reference copy of the web site (on your 
computer), then copies the changed files into the reference copy, 
then synchronizes them with the web server.

I don't know whether a web site created by iWeb on a .Mac account 
will also suffer from this problem, but it wouldn't surprise me if it 
also has to re-upload the entire web site if you make any changes.

-- 
David Empson
dempson at actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand