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Mirroring, iweb, ipower, oy. (17 posts)

  • Started 16 years ago by basshole
  • Latest reply 16 years ago from Scott McGuire
  • basshole Member

    Let me start at the beginning--the idea of the mirror function is to allow you to, say, update your site only slightly in your web editor program locally (for me, Iweb) and then upload only those changed parts of the site to the server, instead of having to re-upload every single file on the site every time you make a change, right?

    I followed (I think) the instructions in Help for setting up mirror folders, but when I made a simple background change to the pages on my site, then mirrored it, I didn't see them reflected online.

    Here's my chain - I create site in iweb, publish to folder on desktop. Desktop folder is mirrored to rootest of the root diretories on my Ipowerweb server. So with the one touch mirror document, I should be able to quickly save and publish changes to my site if I publish to the desktop folder, then mirror, right? Something's not working, then. Is it this date/time modification thing I read about in other threads?

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    Yes, the Mirror function is designed to only upload new or changed files, that's correct. It determines which files are new or changed by comparing the size and modification dates of the files on your Macintosh hard drive and the files on the server.

    The problem is that when you make a change in iWeb, and then re-publish your webpages to a folder, iWeb re-creates every page of your site, not just the one you've changed. So all the modification dates of all your webpages are "new," and Fetch's Mirror function will upload them all. So unfortunately, the Mirror function isn't very useful when you use iWeb as your webpage creator. We wish this weren't so, but it's really a problem with how iWeb operates.

    Did the Mirror function upload anything when you tried it?

    One reason you may not have seen your changes is that I don't think mirroring your Mac's Desktop folder to the root folder of the server is what you want. You want to mirror the contents of the folder you publish the website to, not the entire Mac desktop. So you should choose the folder you publish to as the local folder in the Mirror command instead. I am not sure if the root folder of your server account is correct or not - you should check with Ipowerweb and make sure that is where you should upload your webpages (some servers require that webpages go in a special folder, such as "www" or "public_html" - exactly what varies from server to server).

    If that doesn't seem to be the problem, another reason you might not have seen your changes is that your web browser might have been showing a cached, out of date version of your website. For some reason iWeb-created websites seem to be susceptible to this. In Safari, go to the page you updated, and go to the View menu, and choose Reload Page. If that doesn't work, go to the Safari menu, and choose Empty Cache and then visit your changed page and see if that shows your updates.

    We have a help topic on using Fetch to upload websites created with iWeb (click the link to read it) - it has other tips about working with iWeb, and it may be helpful to read it over if you haven't already.

    Please let us know if you have other questions.

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    I'm sorry, I guess I "mis-wrote" before. The folder on my desktop IS the folder I publish to. When I publish to a folder from Iweb, it's a desktop folder simply named after my site. What ends up in there is a folder called "site" and an index.html file. The first time I ever uploaded, I didn't know where to "path" the upload, so I just did it to where it defaulted. It seemed to work, as my site now looked like the new build. This would appear to be the "raw directory", 'cause now that directory has the site folder, index.html, as well as public ftp and public html (which are already on the ipower server. I know that fetch works correctly 'cause whenever I upload the entire site's contents (which takes more than an hour considering the large amount of video content), it updates correctly. It's when I mirror that it doesn't reflect the changes.

    Tried the cache/reload thing. . .that doesn't seem to fix it.

    I don't understand, though--if, with Iweb, when I publish to the folder, all the pages and whatnot are modified with "new" dates, wouldn't Fetch still recognize those dates as newer than what's in my server folder, and overwrite them, displaying the changes the next time I go to view my site? Is there a way, with Iweb, to manually upload the new pages, and any new files I add, without publishing to a folder?

    Just read the link you pointed me to. That blows. I like Iweb's "dumbass" interface, 'cause it lets me have no knowledge of HTML and still make a decent looking page.

    It's hard to tell if it uploads anything when I mirror. The last time I tried it, I renamed the pages so they were shorter, so of course it made new folders for those pages and put all the files in them and uploaded all the new stuff, but the site still looked the same. If all I do is change the way the text looks on a page or something, and then mirror, it takes like twenty seconds and I can't tell if it's just doing a comparison or if it's actually uploading anything. If it is, it's just the .html files themselves, right?

    I'm assuming any other FTP software is going to have the same problem with my Iweb site, since the problem stems from how Iweb publishes, rather than than being a Fetch issue?

    Here's another angle, let's say I publish to a folder. What files out of that folder do I need to upload (if I wanted to handpick specific stuff to upload instead of the entire site contents) to update the site? Let's say I add one new video file to a page, what, besides that video file, and the file for the page itself (say, "videos.html") would I need to upload to make the site update correctly?

    [This message has been edited by basshole (edited 12-31-2007).]

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    > if, with Iweb, when I publish to the folder, all the pages and whatnot
    > are modified with "new" dates, wouldn't Fetch still recognize those
    > dates as newer than what's in my server folder, and overwrite them,
    > displaying the changes the next time I go to view my site?

    Yes, if the Mirror window is set up with the correct local and remote folders, it should do that.

    > Is there a
    > way, with Iweb, to manually upload the new pages, and any new files I
    > add, without publishing to a folder?

    No, there is no way to upload using FTP in iWeb at all - not the entire site, not just new files. iWeb can only upload to .Mac accounts, otherwise, you have to use an external FTP application such as Fetch. Unfortunately, while it is easy to use for creating pages, Apple has optimized iWeb to work with .Mac; iWeb's support for FTP publishing leaves something to be desired.

    > It's hard to tell if it uploads anything when I mirror. The last time I
    > tried it, I renamed the pages so they were shorter, so of course it made
    > new folders for those pages and put all the files in them and uploaded
    > all the new stuff, but the site still looked the same.

    If you changed all the page names so they were shorter, and iWeb created a bunch of differently named folders and files, then tried to upload them again without deleting the old pages that were already on your website, it is possible that the mixing of the old folder/file names and new folder/file names is causing your site to display incorrectly. If you make changes like that, it's best to delete the files on the server already, and upload the new ones.

    > If all I do is
    > change the way the text looks on a page or something, and then mirror,
    > it takes like twenty seconds and I can't tell if it's just doing a
    > comparison or if it's actually uploading anything. If it is, it's just
    > the .html files themselves, right?

    Unfortunately no, iWeb marks all your media files as "new" as well - even if they were on a page you did not change - so the Mirror command should upload all your media files as well. If it only took 20 seconds, this suggests that the mirroring is not set up right.

    You can check the transcript window (go to the Window menu, choose Fetch Transcript) to see if files were uploaded or not; you will see notes about whether the Mirror command decided a file needed uploading or not. If it doesn't seem to be uploading anything, let us know and we can investigate further.

    > I'm assuming any other FTP software is going to have the same problem
    > with my Iweb site, since the problem stems from how Iweb publishes,
    > rather than than being a Fetch issue?

    Yes.

    > Here's another angle, let's say I publish to a folder. What files out of
    > that folder do I need to upload (if I wanted to handpick specific stuff
    > to upload instead of the entire site contents) to update the site? Let's
    > say I add one new video file to a page, what, besides that video file,
    > and the file for the page itself (say, "videos.html") would I need to
    > upload to make the site update correctly?

    Unfortunately, our experience has been that trying to upload just certain files to update an iWeb site can lead to problems, because it's hard to tell exactly what iWeb updated and the way iWeb creates links between pages and folders. I would say you should upload everything in the folder that iWeb creates for that page at the very least, but I can't guarantee that will work. We haven't experimented extensively with doing partial uploads of iWeb sites, though, so I can't really give a definitive answer to that question - you'll have to experiment yourself.

    Sorry, I wish I had better answers for you.

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    That's all right. Not your fault. Is there, then, another WYSIWYG web design tool, affordable, that's a simply intuitive as Iweb, that works better with the mirroring function?

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    Two other popular, simple webpage creating programs are:

    RapidWeaver - http://www.realmacsoftware.com/rapidweaver/

    and

    Sandvox - http://www.karelia.com/

    I don't have personal experience with either one, although I have spoken with a couple of friends who said positive things about RapidWeaver.

    Both have built-in FTP uploading capability, so much as we hate to say it, you may not even need to use Fetch when you use them (although their FTP capabilities are limited, so some RapidWeaver and Sandvox users do continue to use Fetch as well).

    Since I haven't tried them, I can't guarantee that either of their publish-to-a-folder features works better with the Fetch Mirror function, although we haven't ever received a message about problems using them with the Mirror function, unlike iWeb...

    I believe both have demos that you can try out before buying.

    Hope this helps,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    [This message has been edited by ScottMcGuire (edited 12-31-2007).]

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    I'll take at look at those.

    Back to fetch. . .is there a reason, if I deleted both the site folder and index.html out of the directory on the ipower server where they were uploaded, that when I re-upload the whole site, it still doesn't look like the new build? This is after reloading the page, emptying cache, etc.

    [This message has been edited by basshole (edited 12-31-2007).]

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    You're still uploading to the root directory on the server, correct?

    I would try moving the files you uploaded from the root directory into the public_html folder and see if your changes show up then.

    In the Fetch transfer window, you should be able to just drag the folders in the root directory into the public_html folder, instead of uploading them again.

    Let us know if that fixes the problem.

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    Holy piss! It worked. There was already a duplicate site folder in there. . .maybe fetch was uploading to two directories at one? Who knows. It worked. I'll see if mirroring works now.

    So, to reiterate - when mirroring, I want, on the local side, to choose the folder (with the site/index files inside it) I publish to, NOT the site folder inside it, right? And on the remote side, under path, instead of having nothing (which I had before, which I guess put it in the root directory), I want to use "public html", yes?

    [This message has been edited by basshole (edited 12-31-2007).]

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    Hey, this is weird. . .after redirecting the mirror path to the public html folder in the root directory, it actually worked correctly this time. I mean, it reuploaded all the little graphic files, but didn't upload the huge video files, and when I checked a link that I'd misdirected before, it was corrected. That's good, right?

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    > Hey, this is weird. . .after redirecting the mirror path to the public
    > html folder in the root directory, it actually worked correctly this
    > time. I mean, it reuploaded all the little graphic files, but didn't
    > upload the huge video files, and when I checked a link that I'd
    > misdirected before, it was corrected. That's good, right?

    Yes, that sounds good. :-) Are you using iWeb version 2 (that came with iLife '08)? I've done most of my testing so far with iWeb version 1 - maybe iWeb version 2 has gotten a little cleverer about the modification dates.

    > So, to reiterate - when mirroring, I want, on the local side, to choose
    > the folder (with the site/index files inside it) I publish to, NOT the
    > site folder inside it, right?

    Yes, that's correct.

    > And on the remote side, under path,
    > instead of having nothing (which I had before, which I guess put it in
    > the root directory), I want to use "public html", yes?

    Yes, that's correct too. (As you've found out by now.)

    Glad to hear all seems to be working well for you.

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    Not sure which version of Iweb. . .I got this mac literally a week or two ago, so, whichever version would come with a spankin' new computer.

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Originally posted by basshole:

    Not sure which version of Iweb. . .I got this mac literally a week or two ago, so, whichever version would come with a spankin' new computer.

    That would be iWeb version 2. Interesting, I'll look into how it behaves more.

    It sounds like you should be able to continue using iWeb with the Fetch Mirror command now, but please let us know if you have more questions.

    Thanks,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    Excellent. Thanks for the help. Let me know if I'm just crazy or it actually works right now.

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Originally posted by basshole:

    Excellent. Thanks for the help. Let me know if I'm just crazy or it actually works right now.

    I've done a little testing with iWeb 2, and while I wouldn't go as far as saying "it works right now," since it still re-creates every webpage even when you make the smallest change and also updates the modification date of some media files, it does at least seem to preserve the modification dates of some media files, which at least means not all your large files will get uploaded every time, if you're lucky...

    And it sounds like it's doing enough of the right thing for you, anyway!

    Best,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • basshole Member

    I have to tell you, it seems to be working as intended for me. I tried it again after making a few small updates to my site, and the update only took at most 2 minutes. It changed the pages I altered, didn't upload any large files. Maybe that's a problem for some people, but for what I'm doing with the site right now, it's great. Bought the software. Thanks.

    Posted 16 years ago #

  • Scott McGuire Administrator

    Hi,

    You're welcome, good to hear, and thanks for purchasing Fetch!

    Best,

    Scott McGuire
    Fetch Softworks

    Posted 16 years ago #

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