iWeb Tips and tricks

After publishing yesterday's story about iWeb I did some more testing of the pages and I wasn't very happy with the number of incomplete page loads/errors I was getting on the photo set pages. It was pretty clear that the problem was the png thumbnails iWeb produced. Anytime you publish a page with images that use the stock iWeb image borders or drop shadows this will be a problem. Rather than render well optimized pngs or jpgs it renders huge pngs. My photo page thumbnails were each 40 - 60kb! Perhaps not a big deal with a highspeed connection but on dial-up it is unbearable. The trick is to drop the images in and resize rather than drop onto the nifty image placeholders. The downside is no neat reflection effects or graphic image borders but the upside is a page with well optimized jpg thumbnails of 12-16kb. The two themes which default to basic, no border photo pages are simply called "Black" and "White" though I did not test all of the themes. I had actually thinking of switching over to the black theme anyway so I was lucky. Much better and now even the largest photo set of sunsets loads much more quickly and without errors. If you prefer one of the other themes just set up your photo page then select all the photos and open the graphic tab of the inspector. Set the stroke to none and you're finished.

Tip number two concerns the slide-show produced when publishing a photo page to a server other than .Mac. The .Mac slide show is a beautifully rendered show based on Ajax. If you're publishing to your own server it's this terrible brushed metal window from the 2001 era. However, it is possible to download an alternative slideshow which is based on javascript and is free. Just download the file and decompress which will produce a folder called "SlideShow_assets". After you publish your iWeb site drop this into the main folder and replace the iWeb produced folder of the same name. Done. Of course each time you make a change to your iWeb site and republish, your alternative slideshow folder will be replaced again by the original iWeb slideshow folder so keep a copy of the alternative slideshow around in case you accidentally re-upload the iWeb version.

Last tip: visit Rowan Cottage. Just a nice little family iWeb site that happens to be loaded with articles about using and customizing iWeb. A fantastic iWeb resource and perfect compliment to Apple's iWeb discussion forum.

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