Chapter 1: Notes about publishing to a folder

Chapter 2: How does an FTP application work (basic)

Chapter 3: How can I avoid uploading the whole site (which is really time consuming) each time I publish?

Chapter 1: Notes about publishing to a folder

Note that some iWeb features will not work when publishing to a folder.

Among the features that don’t work when publishing to a folder are:

1. -Hit counter
   

2. -Password protection
   

3. -Comments and attachments
   

4. -Personal domains
   

5. -RSS feeds (unless you specify the url when publishing)
   

For most/all of these features you will find alternatives on this iWeb FAQ site.

Chapter 2: How does an FTP application work (basic)

First thing to do is, of course, choose and download an FTP application. Have a look at the Useful Applications FAQ for this.

I will use Cyberduck for the example which is pretty good and really easy to use:

First thing I have to do when I launch the application for the first time is configure it to allow it to access the server and retrieve/send data.

I click on Open Connection

and get a dialog window like this one:

In the FAQ’s and/or Support section at my hosting I am told what I have to insert in those fields

What the server is, what the username is to access and of course my password.

I check the Add to Keychain box (so I don’t have to insert the data each time) and click on Connect.

It now is ready to connect to my server and retrieves the data from it. It displays the files that are on my server in the main window

To make things easier Bookmark the location you upload your files to in Cyberduck. If the Bookmark drawer doesn’t display click on Bookmarks in the menu that displays on the top of the Cyberduck window. Then Click on “+” at the bottom of the Bookmarks drawer to add a Bookmark.

To upload a file go to the File menu and choose Upload, choose the files to be uploaded (index.html + Folder having the same name I named my site in iWeb) or drag&drop them from the finder into the main field.

When the upload starts a window will popup displaying upload progress

and that’s it...

To delete files select them in the main window, hit ctrl+click and choose Delete.

Chapter 3: How can I avoid uploading the whole site (which is really time consuming) each time I publish?

Here are three things you could do:

1) Using Cyberduck. (THE ONE I LIKE THE MOST)

Cyberduck looks for the date a file was modified last and the size of the file. If the size of a file equals the size of a file on the server this file will not be uploaded.

All you have to do is Synchronise using Upload. And here’s how it goes:

Open Cyberduck and insert the data to connect to the server as explained in Chapter 1.

Go to your Bookmarks and select the server you want to use.

Go to Action

and choose Synchronize

Now you will have to choose the folder to synchronise with, thus the folder you publish to from iWeb (The folder containing the index.html file and the folder named with the name of your site).

A popup window will display. There choose Upload.

Click Continue.

Cyberduck now compares the files on your computer and on your server and uploads only the files that changed since the last time you published.

From time to time delete all from the server and re-upload the whole website to delete obsolete files from the server (files that aren’t used anymore). I do that once every 4 month, about three times an year.

2) Keep all your published folders in a WebsiteFolder. If you update something in one or two pages publish to a folder on the desktop and drag the updated pages into the appropriate website folder to replace the original. This way only the updated page gets sent to the server. Read in 3) how it works with new sites appearing in the navbar. The downside is that if you've got a large site the synchronisation process can take some time.

3) Manually select the files you want to be uploaded. Say you change something in the index file, you can go to your ftp client select the index file and then upload only the index file and the folder that contains the documents (like pictures) used in the index file or whatever file you upload.

If you add pages that do not appear in the nav bar, means that on a page you have links to that pages, in your ftp client you can select the pages you added and the page you inserted the links to those pages and upload only those.

It doesn't make it all that complicated if you change the navbar and now want to upload the files you added to the navbar.

You should just remember to upload

The Scripts folder

sitename/Scripts/

and the feed.xml

sitename/feed.xml

too.

It worked for me and as you can see it's not complicated at all. Scripts and feed.xml are not huge files less then 500KB together so it will not take you a lot of time to upload them.

I like 1) the most.

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