Well for those that didn't know I converted to the Mac (MacBook Pro) about a year ago. On the Mac I use RapidWeaver from RealMacSoftware to keep my personal website and blog up to date. Now I love RapidWeaver as it's easy to use and extremely versatile, but one thing that does annoy me is that it doesn't seem to like publishing a lot of files over a slow link.

Let me explain a little, while the man from Jaguar goes off to find me a new car battery. In India I have a 2 Mbps DSL line. Now when I say 2 Mbps line what I really mean is I have a line that at some point in the future might actually start to offer 2 Mbps transfer rates and I might at some point be able to get an upstream rate that is marginally quicker than a fax machine. Not that that is really RapidWeavers fault, but I recently decided to tidy up the site a little, area's like the Photo Gallery where becoming a little cluttered and I wanted to simplify the structure a little. So I set about creating an archive area and moving some pages around, all of which was very easy using RapidWeaver, but when I came to publish the site there were over 3000 pages that needed to be re-published. So I clicked the publish button and RapidWeaver started to weave its magic. The only problem was that it never got beyond the first few hundred pages before it through up an FTP error.

So frustrated I kept hitting the publish button and RapidWeaver went through the motions, but I was never quite convinced that it was doing what it said it was doing. So last night I decided to take the plunge and after checking everything was where I wanted it to be and saving the site project file ten times I cleared the publishing cache and marked all the paged as changed, I FTP'ed to my website and deleted the entire contents. I then went back to RapidWeaver and clicked the publish buttons. RapidWeaver went through the export phase, and then advised me that 5134 pages need to be uploaded, and off I went to bed (with a doubt or two in my mind).

I woke up this morning to find that every single page had uploaded and not one error was encountered. I thanked my 22 Mbps Internet line and the Internet gods. I checked the site and everything seems to be there, even my newly implemented Google Analytics code and FavIcon.

What's does that mean to users of the site? Well not much really, but what it should mean is that there are no broken links (Google Web Tools showed four) and that everything is a little less cluttered. If you have bookmarked anything other than the home page you might find those links don't work as I have tidied up the file structure a little too, but everything does feel a lot more ordered; to me at least.

If you do have any problems let me know via the Contact Form. Otherwise enjoy!

Tags: Technology, RapidWeaver

Well normally I read, listen to my iPod, or fall asleep on the train in the morning, but this morning I thought I would put the hour train journey to good use and migrate some of the photo's I had on the old site to the new one.

Well I didn't need the hour. Once I had figured out how I was going to structure the gallery it took me about 20 minutes to upload the 6 most recent albums. You can check out the gallery here or by following the links to the left.

Now in terms of web site development I'm nearly complete with what I planned to do. As I have said before the idea was to keep it simple and to reduce the amount of administration it required. Well I think I have done that. I have been using RapidWeaver 3.6 from realmacsoftware, with some Plug-Ins from YourHead.com, and must say that I am extremely impressed. Not only are the applications very easy to use but they integrate with Mac OS X and the iLife applications very well.

If you are interested in taking RapidWeaver for a test run you could do worst than take a look at Don McAllister's ScreenCastsOnline RapidWeaver section.

Tags: Technology, RapidWeaver