SilverMac

iLife 06 is out and most of the folks seem to be very happy with it, me included. One thing I welcomed was iWeb, a website creation tool that Apple should have introduced years ago, but better late than never.

Just prior to launch someone figured out, from the slip-up screenshots, that Apple will realease iWeb, but nobody knew exactly what it was going to be. Okay, it was an easy guess it will be web site creation tool, but on what it was based – nobody had a clue. Speculation was that it might be RapidWeaver by Real Mac Software. I remember around the time of Paris Expo 2005 and just prior to launch of RapidWeawer 3.2 there were some voices in their forums that program might have been aquired by Apple. Well, it didn’t happen and I’m glad and sad at the same time.

It would be great if Apple included something like RapidWeaver into iLife, users would love it, but then again the good old RapidWeaver would be gone. I have been using it for some time now and the enthusiasm of developers is unprecedented. Colaboration with userbase is second to none and I guess if Apple bought the RW off, they would really screw it up in a version or two.

So Apple decided not even to go Konfabulator way this time and wrote the application themselves. What they did – it leaves me pretty disappointed. Entire iWeb is so ‘dot-mac-icised’ (you figure out how to pronounce this word) they could have named it iDotMac. Seriously.

But the question is – Can you publish to the non-dot-mac web server?

The answer is no. You can’t publish (like RapidWeaver does) but you can save it to a local folder and then upload it via FTP. So let’s see how it all works.
When you open the program, the first thing that happens is introduction to .Mac. And this happens every time you open it.

So if you are happy to pay for .Mac here is your chance. Otherwise hit Cancel.

I will leave it up to you to decide whether you like what you get in iWeb or not, but when the time for publishing comes you are faced with yet another .Mac offer. Publish button is in the lower left corner of your screen, and once you hit it you get the message above again.

So hitting Cancel button will bring us back to the site editing and the only other thing we can do, is to publish to the local folder.

To do so we simply go to File | Publish to a Folder… in menu bar.

The next step is to select the folder or to create one and then publish it there. But guess what comes next ? Yes, another .Mac reminder, this time not telling us to subscribe but rather telling what we are missing. Oh, come on, Steve !

Unless you really really want to subscribe to .Mac – you are left alone from here. What you need to do is to get an FTP program and upload the site to your non-dot-mac hosting service.

I noticed one interesting thing regarding files in the local folder, they decided to create index.html file that is just a redirector to another index.html file that sits one folder below.

I’m not exactly sure why is this, but I guess it might be something to do with password protection which is one of the options with .Mac. So if you’re uploading files to your web server you will be quite fine to upload only the files and folders contained in “Site” folder in the above example (or whatever your site folder is called).