[WelMac] ILife 06

[John Crook]

On 3 Mar 2006, at 10:52 AM, David Empson wrote:

> 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
>
Thanks David for the extra run down.  I have a .mac account, so that's 
probably what I'll use.
However, the need to reload the whole site (if that's what happens) 
sounds like it could be a pain if the site is more than two or three 
pages.

Your suggestions sound eminently sensible.  Have you considered posting 
them on an Apple list where somebody in a position of influence might 
take note and do something about it?

John Crook