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.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Mac, iLife, iWeb

Early last year I posted a mini-review of the iWeb and .Mac combo. My conclusion was that iWeb was a good start but that the code, graphics, images and resulting site were bloated. I also commented on the incredible slowness of .Mac. Since that time I've been happily using RapidWeaver and will continue to do so for this site as well as the occasional client site. However, with the recent announcement by Flickr that it's early users would have to transition to a Yahoo-based id I decided it might be a good time to revisit iWeb. I don't have a pro/paid account at Flickr which means I'm limited to 200 photos and I've thought before that I might switch over to hosting my photos on my own domain so that I could post as many images as I want (within my allotted space). I've also been thinking that it might be a good idea to just have a few personal pages to compliment the professional tone of the MacProductive site. Seems like the perfect opportunity to spend a bit more time with iWeb.

My two goals: 1. Produce a personal sub-site with a variety of photo sets. 2. Become proficient in the use of iWeb. I easily accomplished both in one day: Dennyville.

I really like iWeb. It is a fun and very easy to use application. They've done a great job in making layout feel like Pages and Keynote, both of which are a real joy to use. If you're thinking of using iWeb you may want to consider a few things. Since the images/graphics and code are a bit bloated the pages will tend to load slowly, if it is at all possible, avoid themes that use the artsy, non-standard fonts because those are converted to images which will add even more bloat! If you are publishing to a folder for upload to a server via ftp you may want to consider using Captain FTP for it's file-size based synchronization because it will work best for uploading only your changed files.

What I'm really hoping to see with iWeb 2.0

These are the big four which I would consider serious bugs. I really, really hope they fix these four:

Better graphics/image optimization. There is no doubt that iWeb sites load slowly. On dial-up they are painful and even with a broadband connection they are noticeably slow.

Direct ftp publishing to any host. In regards to the publishing process, as it is currently it is awkward and inefficient to the point of being useless without broadband. While it allows for publishing to a folder which can be FTP'd to any host, each update produces an entirely new set of files. Pages and photos that were not edited are republished with a new creation date which means the date-based synchronization of most FTP programs is useless. Captain FTP is the exception and it offers the option to ignore file dates and bases synchronization on file sizes. This makes uploading the updated files of an iWeb site much easier. If Apple's not going to offer direct ftp publishing then I hope they'll change the updating process so that only files which are changed are actually re-published. Doing so would open up proper synchronization to practically any ftp application.

Semantic code. As I understand the situation, iWeb code is technically standards compliant and will validate. This is good. But it is incredibly bloated code and it disregards any notion of the semantic web. Don't get me wrong... these pages look fantastic and the vast majority of iWeb's intended audience have probably never heard of "the semantic web". For these folks what matters is that they can very easily create a website that looks great. But it does matter if for no other reason that all the bloated code adds to the bloated graphics for an even slower experience. Apple, please give us some p tags!

Changing Themes. As it is now, once a page is set up the theme cannot be changed. The only option is to set up a new page and copy paste content from the old page to the new and even that's not clean because it will carry over various elements of the previous theme such as page image borders. If I have an entire site, say 10 pages that I want to change I have to do it page by page.

There are plenty of things I'd like to see added in as new features or improvements in current features, particularly for folks not using .Mac. A better slideshow or slideshow options for photo sets for sites which are not hosted on .Mac. Currently there is just one option and it appears to date back to the early days of .Mac/HomePage. Yuck. Keyword tagging for photos would also be nice especially if iPhoto keywords could be carried over. Searching... I'd love to be able to use the search mechanism that is available for .Mac. I'm not sure what they're using for that or if it's possible to carry it over to non-apple servers but would be nice. Same goes for comments. Adding the ability to edit themes would begin to cut against the grain of iWeb's intent so more themes would be great. The included themes are very nice but still, if users are limited to only what Apple provides, more is better.

iWeb, like all the iApps Apple hase created, is off to a good start. Certainly it is a bit rough around the edges but that's to be expected in a first version. I'm really looking forward to iWeb 2.

Technorati Tags: Apple, OS X, Macintosh, Mac, iLife, iWeb, flickr