Good News! Forget all these steps- here is an easy way to get iWeb sites onto your own server!

Get “Easy iWeb publisher” for free from Plyxim, here is the link: http://www.plyxim.com/

I haven’t had a chance to test it- but, I’m sure it’s got to be easier than all these step by step proceedings!

If there is one thing I haven’t been happy with in Word Press is its ability to manage a page of photos- so, for Mac users, I put together this little step-by-step instructions on how to use iPhoto and iWeb from iLife 06 to build a gallery page.

If you are looking for one reason to buy a Mac instead of a PC- the way iPhoto handles importing, managing, working with pictures from a digital camera is it. with the addition of iWeb it also gives you a great tool to build a photo page.

Here is how to do it- starting with the basics:

1. Connect camera- or card reader.
2. iPhoto 06 should open automatically.
3. Before you hit import photos- name the roll- adding a roll description.
4. Crop and name photos- the title will appear under each photo.
5. To organize them for the site- you can use the “Batch change” for both titles and contents.
6. Click iWeb option- choose “Photo page”
7. Close the .mac page (it’s Apple’s hosting service- and you own your own domain)
8. Choose a template that you wish to use just for the photo page. As far as I can tell- once you select this template- the only way to switch templates is to delete the page and recreate it from iPhoto.
9. You can change and edit items on the template in iWeb. I suggest removing the “include page in navigation menu” from the page menu.
10. Make title link back to your post: select the title text (starts out as the name of the album from iPhoto)- select the text- pick the link icon in the inspector (the link icon is the last icon on the right- a little blue circle with the swooshed arrow in it).
11. Select “enable as a hyperlink”
12. Make this a link back to the url for the post (you find this by clicking on the headline- and copying the url for the post).
13. Choose publish- here is where it gets a little hinky- iWeb wants to publish to a .Mac account. Apple hasn’t provided a way to publish to your own hosting solution (BOOOO!)
14. Instead – save it to your sites folder on your hard drive. Note: Subscribe buttons work only if you specify the site’s URL (address) in the dialog that appears when you choose File > Publish to a Folder.
15. Continue when you are prompted about Content rights (it is your content- right?)
16. Then open Transmit– or use the handy dandy free extenison for Firefox, FireFTP, and this is a little goofy- your first folder has a page called index.html and a folder (the site name)- open the site name folder- and you will have another index.html page and another .html file (the short title of the original iPhoto album) plus 3 folders- “images” “SlideShow_assets” and “Name of alum_files”-copy all 3 folders and one of the two .html pages (I prefer the one NOT named index.html) into a folder with a short name- like gallery – on your stuff (the server) and then the address to your page will be www.yoursite.com/folder_name/name.html (Where folder_name is the name you gave the folder – mine is gallery and name.html is the name of the iPhoto album- mine is faves.html)
17. Now – make a link to this page in the post- that you have the link back to on your title from step 10.

I know it seems like a lot of steps- but once you are done- you will have a sweet gallery page to look at- like this:http://blogosopher.com/gallery/faves.html

Note- we’ve tried a couple of WordPress plug in’s like Gallery– with limited success. I would really like iWeb better if it took the iPhoto comment info and put it under each photo- and would allow for alt tagging the photos as well.

If anyone has any better suggestions on how to do this- please share. Thanks.

(See beginning!- new software makes this easy)