After having received some feedback from another developer, I went into heavily improving the backend coding of iMap. iMap has been made more stable and better working in nearly all processes. The only thing that still lacks is a stunning interface. Though that will come with version 2.6. The new version of has three main new enhancements:

• iMap now has a full helpbook that will help you in understanding the errors and getting rid of them without sending me a mail.

  

• iMap has now been updated to support MobileMe as well. You just have to select your option in the preference pane in iMap.
• iMaps backend has been heavily improved. One of the improvements is a complete log system. iMap now logs every action it takes. Whenever you get an error, iMap will log it. You can then mail me these logs and I’ll look into fixing the problem or helping you out.

The update is downloadable via iMap itself. If you have automatic updates set in iMaps preferences, it will automatically notify you of the update. Otherwise you can just select “Check for Updates…” from the “iMap” menu item in iMap.

Enjoy the update!

Holiday time over here in Germany has started and everyones beginning to leave the country. Although we have record temperatures here, the lakes and ocean are darn warm, it’s always nice to see something else. I’ll be moving off to St. Petersburg for about a week. I am not mentioning this to get you all watering your mouths - but I’d like to inform you with what’s gonna happen with the website during that time.

I will not be checking mails or comments on this website in any kind of way. I have my iPhone with me - but answering mails is definitely not in the package. This also includes support emails for iMap. I will continue to sell iMap over the time in which I am in St. Petersburg - but I will not answer any mails as well. Whether sales or support. Please excuse me if I am causing any inconveniences.

Thus, if your thinking of buying iMap, then feel free to do so but please note that you’d be buying it without any support for the next 10 days. If you think you will run into problems then don’t buy it. I’d rather have you wait, than receiving angry complaint mails about me not answering mails. You are warned!

Lastly, if you do have any iWeb problems, there is other help out there in the internet as well. iWebFAQ, led by Cedric, is a great resource with lot’s of wonderful information.

The image of St. Petersburg (above) has been cropped from it’s original available at the Wikipedia article.

All the URLs in your Sitemap have the same priority.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are set to the same priority (not the default priority). Priority indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site and doesn’t impact your site’s performance in search results. If all URLs have the same priority, Google can’t tell which are more important.

This is an issue that comes up with the priority settings in iMap. It is quite stupid and I will be bringing out an update to solve this as soon as I can.
The second warning goes like this:

All the URLs in your Sitemap are marked as having dynamic content.
All the URLs in your Sitemap are marked as having dynamic content. Because it is difficult for search engines to crawl and index dynamic content, this may impact your site’s performance in search results. Check your Sitemap to make sure that your site information is correct.

Now, this is something which I cannot control. Dynamic content is basically a normal webpage with some fancy scripts added to it. These scripts grab certain parts of other files and place it into the main page. This causes the actual page to be built up through lots of small and separate script pages. Google doesn’t like that as it only checks the main page, which of course doesn’t fully have the whole content. Bad! This is one of downsides of iWeb which also is the reason why you can’t run sitemap-generators on your site (and get all pages linked).

Though, as the warnings above are just warnings and not errors, they can be ignored for the time being. I will get rid of the first warning by bringing out an update to iMap - but you will just have to live with the second warning. Sorry people!

Though there are three things that I want to touch on:

• The iPhone is all cool and looks better than ever. It’s available for just half the original price (200$). Totally rocking for new customers but those who’ve just bought the iPhone recently (like me) it’s a fucking kick in the ass. My iPhone basically has no more reselling value which is kind of sad. Though, I’ve known about the rumors so I guess I have to live with it…
• .Mac was never the coolest service that Apple has made … it basically sucked. With the new features that MobileMe offers, it does become quite interesting and offers things that are worth the money. Let’s see how it’ll go in the future.
• As MobileMe replaces .Mac, the question of the iDisk and the connection with iMap/iTweak remains in question. I think not much will change except for URLs but I’ll release an update for both when MobileMe becomes available.

After the 1.4.5 update, I removed this window and attached the checkmarks to the main window itself, now clearly separating which text-fields are for what and when they need to be used.

The idea has never changed, you still have to tick the options you want iTweak to complete. Excuse for the problems it might have caused, I will put a note on the tutorials about that.

For this tutorial, we will be using a free application called iTweak. It has been made to simplify such additions to the iWeb application and so it is just perfect to use.

Please note that this tutorial is only available to those who publish to a folder and upload to a server that is capable of running .htaccess files. Please ask your hosting service first before you start this tutorial.

So let’s get right started!

1. As stated earlier, you will have to have downloaded the latest version of iTweak. Publish your site from iWeb as well.
   To protect your site, you need to have a password, a username and the absolute path to another file (more on that later).
2. We will start off with the password.
   You cannot just type your password directly into iTweak because it has to be encrypted.
   To encrypt your password, visit this site. Then, enter your username and your preferred password. For this tutorial I will be using “Hello” as my username and “World” as my password. See this example:

   

   Click “Create Password” and continue to the next step.

3. Now you will get a page with your username and you password jammed between two dark black bars. It should say your username and then a combination of weird letters and symbols separated from the username through a colon. Now copy this encrypted password to your clipboard (Shortcut: Apple + C).
4. Open up iTweak and navigate to the “Security” tab. Tick the option to password-protect your site and in the text-field labeled “Crypted Password” paste in the encrypted password from the previous step. Make sure you copy/type this password 100% correctly!!!
   You can now type in your username in iTweak as well. Your window should now look something like this:

   

5. Now we have to deal with filling the last text-field; the absolute path to the .htpasswd file. There are two options to solve this. Either you can use a file I made to easily get the absolute path (requires a PHP-capable server) or you have to contact your hosting service and ask them about the absolute path.

   » Option A (Choose this one if your server has PHP): Go ahead and download this file. Place the file named “info.php” inside the published folder from iWeb. Upload the whole folder (or just the contents, depending on how you like it) to your server. Now visit the file in your browser by typing a URL similar to this:

   http://domain.com/Sitename/info.php

   or if you only upload folder contents then type something similar to this:

   http://domain.com/info.php

   When you view the file you should find a huge blue table outlining all sorts of geeky stuff. Search for “SCRIPT_FILENAME” and to the right of that you will see the absolute path to the “info.php” file.
   Now copy the whole path except for the first slash and the “/info.php” extension:

   

   » Option B (Only choose this if your server does not have PHP): If you server does not support PHP, then simply contact your hosting provider and ask them for the absolute path to be used inside your .htaccess file. They will know what your talking about.

6. Having acquired the absolute path in the previous step, paste it into the provided text-field in iTweak. See this image:

   

7. Now choose your published site by hitting the “Choose Published Site” button and then hit “Process Site.” iTweak will now protect your site with the 100% secure .htaccess method. It will create two invisible files that you won’t see in the Finder. If you upload your site to your server by simply grabbing the whole published folder, then thats fine and the protection will work fine. On the other hand, if you just upload the contents of a published folder, then you have to use something like Coda to view invisible files in your Mac and make sure they get uploaded as well!
8. Done! The next time you publish, simply reuse iTweak to add the protection and your ready to go.

Looking for iWeb Templates? Check out my huge collection right here.

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