Customer Reviews

.Mac with iWeb, Second Edition

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Might not have much for experienced power users. .Mac is easy to use and most things you can figure out by yourself. I bought this book before signing up for .MAC ... if I would have known how easy it is to use and how good the apple online documentation is, I probably would not have bought it. But it gave me a good overview of what is possible with .MAC and convinced me further in signing up for .MAC.

Here's the skinny on the iLife software: It works if you give all your money to Apple and their associate companies. If you don't, the software appears to be specifically engineered to *not function properly* using third-party services.

I have a client who purchased iWeb and created a simple one-page web site. He was using my company for hosting. He was unable to publish his pages to the server so he brought his macbook over to the offices and we analyzed the iWeb software and the ftp session it was creating to see what the problem was.

First off, the latest version of iWeb (3.0) has bugs in it. In some cases it will rename a file reference within a web page, but it will be different from the file reference on disk. I verified this. If you name your page something like "index.html" which is common for web pages, iWeb will call it "index.html.html" in one place and "index.html" in another and make the site break. Second, iWeb creates a web page layout that is unnecessarily complicated and problematic. Rather than push your web site to the server in a straightforward manner, it moves the entire web site into a subdirectory and then creates an empty landing page with a meta refresh to your actual site. This can result in your entire web site not being indexed by some search engines. It's ridiculous and stupid.

Third and most important, iWeb does not appear to work properly with third-party hosting. We watched as I published a ONE PAGE web site with three images and some text and it repeatedly failed. And when it failed, all iweb said was, "There was an error communicating with the ftp site."

I watched the ftp logs on my server and there were NO ERRORS. iWeb started putting files to the server and then, for no reason whatsoever, just stopped and reported an ambiguous error message.

I called up a friend of mine who is a major developer partner with Adobe and he laughed and said, "iWeb basically only works with Apple's web hosting." Nowhere is this mentioned.

If you think about it, it's a brilliant, yet unethical scheme. If you have a hosting company you're happy with, you use iWeb, and suddenly things don't work and iWeb says "there's a problem with your hosting company.." You call Apple and they upsell you on their web hosting. Their program appears to INTENTIONALLY MISLEAD CUSTOMERS into thinking there's something wrong with a non-Apple service provider, when in reality, there is no problem. The iWeb software lies.

I have been advising customers to move to more ethical and reliable software such as Freeway.