Upload to a Server

Before the world can feast their eyes on your wonderful creation, you will have to publish your website to a server.

The world is full of Hosting Services each vying for your business with amazing deals and fantastic features - or so they say!

I use, and highly recommend, Host Excellence.  I register my domain names with them as well so that everything is in one place and can be auto renewed  annually without me having to do anything.

Your website files are first published to a folder from iWeb and then uploaded to your server using an FTP application.

Although the latest version of iWeb has a built in FTP, its not the best in the world and there are still a lot of advantages to publishing your website to a local folder and uploading yourself.

The iWeb FTP doesn’t seem to have the ability to upload folders containing your music files and player assets etc. If it does then it sure isn’t obvious to me!

The freeware Cyberduck is also really simple to use and, of course, is free! The new Cyberduck Upload Dashboard Widget is worth a try to see if it saves you valuable time!

You’ll find both of these in the Applications section of this site or you can click the icons on this page.

File Transfer Protocol - FTP

Domains & Domain Names

Some people seem to confuse the terms Domain and Domain Name. They use them in the wrong context and, in their ignorance, confuse others!

Domain means territory. The territory for your website is the server space that it occupies.

The main purpose of a Domain Name is to provide a recognizable name to direct viewers to your numerical server IP address.  This translation from domain name to IP address is accomplished by using the Domain Name System (DNS). We won’t get anymore technical about this!

A hosting service will rent you space on their server and this is your Domain. A domain name registration company will register your Domain Name  - www.mywebsite.com - and direct it to your Domain. Your Domain has a unique IP address which is just a number like - 73.15.41.372

A good hosting service will do both for you and a lot of them will register your domain name for free if you host with them.

SEO

Tools

Keywords

Tags

Sitemap

Verify

Optimize

Upload

Stats

Webmasters

Google Music

Click HERE for an Apptorial Video about shortening URLs and masking.

So now we know to keep this file but heres the next thing. If you build your websites on separate domain files and publish them all to the same folder, you’re going to end up with a bunch of these assets.http files. This is where the nasty little bug in iWeb appears to bite you and cause confusion. If you have two or more sites with similar names and you don’t delete the assets.http file of the first one published, the second site will totally overwrite the first. Not just the assets.http file but the whole site folder as well. But deleting this file will cause all our pages to turn red in iWeb. What do we do?

We put all but one of the offending sites into a “container” folder as Old Toad calls them. He was the first to bring this to my attention as he has lots of “Toad” folders - him being a Toad and all!

The folders that caused my problem are named “iWebMusicWebsite” and “WebMusic”. One of them was put into another folder with a name that didn’t consist of “Music” or “Web”, iWeb was directed to publish the site this and all was well.

Its interesting to note that Web Site Maestro at one point in its development started to behave in a similar way. Ton Brand came up with a fix in about an hour!

The exact function of this file is a mystery to me and I don’t really care what it does as I don’t use the iWeb FTP due to the fact that I add tags for SEO and optimize my files before upload.

When you publish to a local folder, the file appears along with the index.html and the folder containing the website files.

Now we all know that when you add a page or make an update to an existing one in iWeb, the page name turns from blue to red in the left column of the application’s window. After publishing they will all be blue which is my favorite color. Now here’s the thing - if we delete this seemingly useless assets.http file, the next time we launch out domain file all the pages in the list will have turn red again.

With introduction of iWeb ’09, and its somewhat dysfunctional FTP, a new file appears when a site is published to a local folder. This the “assets.http” file.

Yummy FTP

When I need to FTP I use and recommend Yummy FTP. You can see why from the screenshot below.

The application window allows me to see all the files on both my Mac and the server - side by side.

Being able to "see" into the root folder on your server and compare the files and their structure with those in your local folders goes a long way to helping you understand how things are organized and to trouble shoot any problems.

Files can be rearranged on both your Mac and the server, as well as up/downloading, simply by dragging them around.