You’ve made a webpage, but people are complaining that it’s too slow to load.
It may be that they have a slow computer, or it may be that your webpage has too many large files in it, and it should be made smaller. Safari can tell you how many files it needs to load, and how big they are. Here’s how.

1. First enable the developer menu in safari. To do this QUIT SAFARI, open the terminal and type in the following and hit return:
defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1
OR
Download Onyx and under ‘Parameters’ ‘Safari’ select the ‘Enable Debug Menu’ option.

2. Load your page in Safari, and under Develop select ‘Show Web Inspector’

3. This will open a new window down the bottom. Click the Resources Tab, then the Size Tab.

You will now see a graph of all the files on your webpage and how big they are. It will look something like this:

You can see in this example (wpcc.org.au) that the entire webpage is 1.028 MB – reasonably large, most of it images. The best way to reduce it would be to go back and find the original images on your computer and compress them to make them smaller. Lots of these images are quite small and yet are 70KB – they could be reduced to 10 or 20KB probably without muck loss of image quality.

As a comparison:
Apple.com uses about 600K, notice it’s reasonably graphic rich and yet only 250Kb of images.
macintoshhowto.com uses 963Kb – a bit big.
google.com uses 177Kb – very slim!

If you click on ‘time’ instead of size you can see a graph of how long the various parts take to load on your computer.

1. create your page using iWeb.
2. you’ll need to know the address of your page once you’ve published it.
3. go to a web page that offers free counters… eg. http://www.e-zeeinternet.com/
4. enter your details on this page including the final address of the published page
5. this page will provide you with some html code. copy this code.
6. return to your iweb page.
7. click on Web Widgets & choose HTML Snippet
8. Inside the text box created paste the HTML code from the free counter page. Click Apply
9. You can drag the snippet anywhere on your page.
10. Done!

1. Go to http://blogger.com

Advantages: Very easy: Sign in. Start a blog. A true blog. Invite others to post if you want them to. People can make comments. Add pictures.
Disadvantages: Probably the only disadvantage is that you can’t dramatically change the layout of the blog or integfrate it into an existing website. It sits on it’s own. You can choose different themes.

See an example here.

2. Get a .mac account and use iweb.

Advantages: Very easy. You can have it as part of your website. Easy to change the appearance. Easy to add photos. Just as easy to add podcasts.

Disadvantages: Only 1 author. No comments, (except with a hack – icomment). It is actually a web page makign program that looks liek it makes a blog, not a real traditional blog in the sense that a blog resides totally on a server, you can post from anywhere, it generates the pages on the fly as people ask for them. Hence the ability to have multiple authors, comments etc.

See an example here.

3. Use WordPress.

Get a program like WordPress but to do this you need a server. ie you need to be paying for a website to be hosted somewhere that has php and mysql. It takes 5 min to set up if you know what you are doing, (I set one up last week in 5 min). It takes about 5-10 hours if it’s your first time (I know from experience!).

Advantages: Flexible. Anything you want it to do, it can do. Thousands of add-ons. Fully customisable. Multiple authors. Can even embed in existing websites.

Disadvantages. Hard work to set up.
See an example here.

Get Blogging!!!

To submit your site to google go to:

http://www.google.com/addurl/

Add your web address, then wait a couple of days.

do the same for yahoo, msn etc

To see if google already knows about your site type site:http://www.yoursitename in google search

If you want your page to go up in the search results, you need to have other people link to your site from their site.

To see how many sites link to your site type link:http://www.yoursitename in google search.

The more entries here, the higher you will be in the search result, basically that’s a simplified version of how it works.

NOTE: This article is for iWeb 08 and earlier.  Click here for how to do this in iWeb 09.

SUMMARY: iweb normally publishes your website to your .mac account. But it also has an option in the file menu called ‘publish to folder’ which means it saves the entire website onto your computer. (It puts it in your user directory in a folder called ‘sites’)  To publish the site you then have to manually copy  your site  to the web with an ftp program so that others can see it. That information may be all you were after, but if you need step by step instructions on how to do that, read on!

Before you go any further, can I say the apple way of doing things is good and simple, so get a .mac account if you can.  Otherwise, here goes…

1. You need to find out some technical sounding things from you ISP or web provider before you progress. Don’t be scared off by the funny names. They are actually quite simple. These are the details of where your webpage will be stored.

You will need 4 things.

FIRSTLY, the address of the ‘ftp server’ for where you want to put your website. If your website is ‘dubbo.org’ then it will be something like ftp.dubbo.org.

SECONDLY you will have a username and password with it.

FINALLY will also have what we call a ‘directory‘ which is simply the place your files will be stored on the website and it will be something like this: ‘/public_html’

You will need to know all these 4 things before you proceed. It’s no use guessing them. If you don’t know them you need to ring ask your web provider who you are paying for your web hosting what these details are. In summary you need (1) ftp server address, (2) username, (3) password and (4) remote directory (or remote folder).

2. Download w2w. This seems to be the easiest way to do it. It’s here: http://www.wallner.nu/fredrik/software/w2w/ With instructions.

3. Make and edit your website in iweb. In iweb select ‘publish to folder’ and it will save your iweb site into your user/sites directory on your computer.

4. Run w2w and it will copy the website from your user/sites directory on your own computer to you website on the internet. When you run w2w you will see a window like this:

Name can be anything.

Folder is the folder on your home computer. Hit Browse and go to your Macintosh HD/Users/Yourname/Sites/iwebsitetopublish and click on open.

The last 4 settings are the settings we talked about above from your ISP.

Fill them all in and press upload. From then on it remembers your settings for next time.

5. Each time you want to update your webpage, just repeat steps 3 and 4.

That’s it!

http://howto.diveintomark.org/remote-mac/

Spam does get annoying, and once you are receiving spam it’s hard if not impossible to stop it coming to you, all you can do is ignore it (block it). But there are ways to reduce the amount of spam you get.

It’s best to keep your email address off the internet, (eg off any web pages) as there are web crawlers searching every website for email addresses to put on lists and sell to spammers.

Once your email is out there and on someone’s spam list there’s no way to stop it spreading really, so you will probably get an ever increasing amount of spam!

I would suggest if you have a spam problem:

1. Change your email addresses.

2. If you must have a ‘contact email’ on a webpage then get two new email addresss, one that you keep very private that you give to your friends and family, and then public webpage one one that you can have forwarded to your private one, but try to change the web page one every year or so when it collects spam. (eg info@dpc.org.au, dpc@dpc.org.au, contactus@dpc.org.au etc.)

3. Get your ISP to turn on spam filtering. (This is generally much better than your own email program email filtering.) There are various levels of spam filtering, some very aggressive and will block most spam, but also the occasional real email. ASk you ISP about spam filtering.

4. Gmail has the best spam filtering I have found. Move your email over to gmail.

1. Get a telstra bigpond external wireless USB modem, it looks like this:

2. Download the installation software from bigpond.com downloads. You actually need to have internet access to do this! Otherwise you can download it from another computer and copy it to your computer using a USB drive.

3. Follow the instructions to install.

4. When you are using the modem, make sure you plug in and turn on the modem after you boot up or wake up your computer, and turn of the modem before going to sleep. Don’t put your computer to sleep without unplugging the modem or it will crash. This is a bug with the Bigpond software.

A podcast is simply a small file called an ‘RSS feed’ that points to the audio (mp3) file that you want to podcast. This little ‘RSS feed’ file is then registered with a podcast site, like the apple itunes podcast site.

How it works
When someone clicks on the podcast icon in itunes, it takes them to the apple itunes podcast site, where they can search for the podcast they want. The apple site then points their itunes software to the little RSS file, which then points their itunes to the mp3 file that contains the audio. It sounds complicated, but it’s really just a series of little signposts that eventually point to the mp3 file.

So as you can see, we need to put the mp3 file up, then create an RSS feed that points to the mp3 file, and then we register this RSS feed with itunes. We can then access the podcast from itunes.

So really the audio file alone is not the podcast, the rss file is not the podcast, the itunes store is not the podcast. The podcast is really the whole set of signposts.
The advantage of a podcast is that all the audio files are easy to find because they are centralised into the itunes store, and the process of downloading them once you are subscribed is automatic.

Let’s look at how to do it step by step.

1. Put up the mp3 file

The first set is to make an mp3 file (eg via ‘itunes’) and then place it on the internet somewhere using an ftp program (‘cyberduck’ is a good ftp program). You will need an account on a webserver to do this. This is dealt with elsewhere on ‘How to put a file on the internet’). The file will be called something like ‘talk1.mp3′ and it will be at a location somethign like ‘http://mywebsite.com.au/talks/talk1.mp3′. For our example we used the real file called ’20060212.mp3′ which we put on the web at at http://sermons.dpc.org.au/1john/20060212.mp3

2. Make an RSS file that points to the mp3 file

Now we need to make an RSS file that will point the the mp3 file to tell the podcast directory (in this case, the apple itunes podcast directory) where to find the mp3 file. There are hundreds of programs to make an RSS feed (eg ‘feedforall’) , but it’s hard finding a free one! Vodcaster looks good but it’s only for tiger. One good free one is at http://www.phelios.net/rss-writer.html it’s easy to use. The program will ask for information like the name of the mp3 file, artist, title of webcast etc, and it will put all this information into a file called an RSS file, which it will save to your hard drive. The program will give the file an extension of .xml So we called ours dpc and it was saved as ‘dpc.xml’

3. Put the RSS file somewhere on the web

It doesn’t matter where. We uploaded ours to http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml

4. Register the podcast with itunes

The last step is to let itunes know where the rss file is kept. Open up itunes, and click on the ‘podcasts’ icon. Down the bottom click on ‘podcasts directory’. This will take you to apple’s podcast page on the itunes music store. There is a link called ‘Submit a Podcast’ which you can click on. It will ask you for the podcast feed url. This is the address of the rss fiel you just created. (Eg http://sermons.dpc.org.au/dpc.xml) Paste the address and click continue. Unfortunately you need to then enter your apple ID, you’ll need to register with apple to get one, it doesn’t cost anything, it’s not a .mac membership, just an apple id. Apple will send an email telling you when the podcast has been approved. It may take an hour or two.

5. Subscribe to the podcast

You should now be able to find your podcast on the ituens webpage. Go to itunes, podcasts, podcasts directory. There is a box to search for a podcast. Type in part of the name of your podcast (eg I might type in ‘Dubbo’) and click ‘search all podcasts’. It will display all the matches, in our case, 1 match – ‘DPC BibleTalks’. Click on subscribe to subscribe ot the podcast. You are now subscribed to the podcast!

6. Link to the podcast

Now the final step is to link to your new podcast from a webpage. Open itunes podcasts and next to your subscibed podcast title is a little right arrow. Click on this and it wil take you to the itunes homepage for your podcast.

If you right click on the podcast entry down the bottom, there is an option called ‘Copy itunes Music Store URL’. Click this and then it will copy the URL to the clipboard. You can then paste this into your homepage or email it to your friends. Ours was http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=121967957&s=143460&i=2214949

If you click on this it will open itunes and take you to our newly created podcast!