Ask Ein

Using Apple's iWeb to publish somewhere other than to .Mac

Q: I'm using Apple's iWeb from iLife '06 to create web pages. Can I publish the web pages to my own web site or must I publish to .Mac?

A: Yes. You can use iWeb to publish your content to a folder and then transfer the content to your own web site using regular file transfer mechanisms.

Discussion:
Apple is definitely pushing the simple one-button publish mechanism of iWeb integrated with their .Mac hosting/e-mail service. However, according an Apple iWeb Technical Support article, it is possible to have the content placed into a folder on your local computer. To do that, the article suggests the following:

1. Choose File > Publish to a Folder.
2. Choose a location to store your site, and then click Choose.

They also warn that doing so means you can't have password protection, the hit counter, or a slideshow with viewing controls. Depending on your web host, however, you may be able to add these things manually yourself.

Once you get the content into a local folder, you can upload it to your web host using the same mechanism you normally would. For most people, this is either via FTP or SFTP, although some people may use WebDAV (like for iDisks, for example).

The following programs allow you to use either FTP/SFTP to upload files to a remote host:

• Panic's Transmit
• Stairways Software's Interarchy
• Xnet Communications's Captain FTP
• RSUG's Fugu (only does SFTP/SCP, not FTP!)

For any SFTP/FTP transfer, you will need know the following things from your web host:

• Your user name and password to login;
• Whether you should use FTP/SFTP, WebDAV, SCP, or something else;
• The address (URI) you should use for connecting to your web host to do file transfers;
• The starting directory where you should upload your content. For many web hosts, this is "web", "home", "html" or something similar. Everything under "web" is accessable to the web.

Remember:

• The folder you choose to create your iWeb site shouldn't itself be uploaded, just the stuff inside it.

• Most web sites use index.html or index.htm as the default starting point for a web site, but not all do. If that doesn't work, try renaming the index.html page to index.htm, default.htm, or default.html, or ask your web host what the default starting page is.