Hosting on .Mac

On Nov 10, 2007, at 06:26, David Clark wrote:
>>
> Only on the web, which is useless.
>
> How can I put this website on dot mac at the same price I'm now
> paying for the dot mac account?
>
> Looking at iWeb, it does not seem that it can be done unless I can
> totally redesign my site to fit one of the iWeb templates.
>
> Comments?

I had the same question . . . my guess is that going through the
domain registration selection process in .Mac preferences tells it
where to forward requests and that iWeb creates a site with an
appropriately named folder somewhere on your iDisk with all the other
stuff.

If this is true; then there isn't any technical reason (probably) that
you couldn't just copy your existing web site into a same named
folder . . . thereby using any web design tools you want. I would tend
to believe that iWeb isn't actually required . . . but just hides the
obvious.

Still, I tried to get an answer by submitting a question to the (ha!)
support folks . . . got a canned answer that iWeb was required.

Anybody know for sure . . . or that has actually tried this? I was
planning on moving my site as well . . . and was going to redesign it
anyway; but didn't see any obvious way to build a import pages or add
new templates other than making them from scratch.

This is the first I heard of using one's own domain on .Mac. I got excited until I read in the help files that one has to use iWeb '08 to perform this trick. I was pretty happy with BBEdit for my personal page, which I've had since late 2001. The idea of needing a separate application for such a simple thing bothers me. Still, maybe .Mac will get its act together sometime.

Mark Stoneman <http://onmymac.blogspot.com>

On Nov 12, 2007, at 3:04 AM, mrstoneman wrote:

> This is the first I heard of using one's own domain on .Mac. I got
> excited until I read in the help files that one has to use iWeb '08
> to perform this trick.

There are various ways you can put a site on .Mac. There are two
places you can put the files, iDisk/Sites and iDisk/Web/Sites. For
the former you get the url homepage.mac.com/username/sitename, for
the latter it's web.mac.com/username/sitename.

Quite aside from the new personal domain name feature, you can always
use simple domain forwarding, with or without masking, to redirect
your personal name to your .Mac url. Normally this just involves
typing that url into a form at the place where you have your name.

iWeb uses the iDisk/Web/Sites folder. The new personal domain name
feature lets you set up a www CNAME entry for web.mac.com at the
place you have your name, and this gets directed by Apple right to
your iWeb site. While you may need iWeb 08 to set this up, I don't
think it is necessary to have your pages created by iWeb -- you can
probably put anything there once the .Mac account settings have been
fixed for the personal name. I think this has been discussed in the
past in Apple's iWeb forum, and that's the best place to ask.

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=188

On Nov 12, 2007, at 5:04 AM, Neil Laubenthal wrote:

> I had the same question . . . my guess is that going through the
> domain registration selection process in .Mac preferences tells it
> where to forward requests and that iWeb creates a site with an
> appropriately named folder somewhere on your iDisk with all the other
> stuff.
>
> If this is true; then there isn't any technical reason (probably) that
> you couldn't just copy your existing web site into a same named
> folder . . . thereby using any web design tools you want. I would tend
> to believe that iWeb isn't actually required . . . but just hides the
> obvious.


I looked into this a bit and here is what I have found so far:

You are right that the domain registration selection process just
tells .Mac where to forward requests. Then you need to set up an CNAME
entry (to point to web.mac.com) with whoever currently handles your
domain.

.Mac now seems to have two tiered web hosting. Anything created with
Homepage, or through web galleries, or any other editor end up at http://homepage.mac.com/your_.mac_id/
. Anything created with iWeb goes to http://web.mac.com/
your_.mac_id/. Your domain name redirects to web.mac.com.

As far as I can tell, Apple puts two folders---/Web and /Web/Sites---
on your iDisk. All of your iWeb designed site information goes in the
"Sites" folder. One wrinkle is that iWeb defines "sites" in an odd
way---basically it is just a folder within the "Sites" folder. So, a
typical iWeb created .mac website might look like:

/iDisk/Web/Sites/index.html
/IDisk/Web/Sites/Site1/
/iDisk/Web/Sites/Site1/Welcome.html
...

Where "Site1" is whatever you called your website in iWeb. (Of
course, you can have as many of these as you like, since it is just a
subdirectory in your website). The /iDisk/Web/Sites/index.html is
just a placeholder that redirects all incoming traffic to /iDisk/Web/
Sites/Site1/Welcome.html (or whatever the top page for your site is
called). iWeb also puts all sorts of things like RSS related files,
css files, and graphics associated with the pages organized in a way
that it deems appropriate. In typical Apple fashion, using iWeb makes
things tremendously easy, but deprives you of control over how things
get done.

There does not seem to be anything preventing you from replacing
everything in /iDisk/Web/Sites/ with your existing website.
(Admittedly I haven't tested this extensively, but I copied everything
over from /iDisk/Sites (my original .mac site) to /iDisk/Web/Sites/
and the Dreamweaver created site seems to have made the transition
okay.)

But, here is the kicker. It does not appear that you can set up the
two necessary folders on iDisk---/Web and /Web/Sites---without using
iWeb. (I wasn't looking very carefully before I did this, but I do
not think the two folders are there by default. I think you have to
"publish" a site with iWeb for them to appear---can anyone confirm
this? And once they do appear, permissions are set in such a way that
there is no way to get rid of them or change their names.)

So, yes, you *need* iWeb---to create the two folders. So, I guess you
would have to borrow a Mac with iWeb on it to publish a blank page
to .Mac. Once you've done that you should be able to replace the
contents with whatever you want.

(Though it remains to be seen if domain forwarding works properly if
you do this. I don't see how it would matter, but I won't know for
sure for another 48 hours while the new CNAME entry trickles down.)

Tn

Tried to reply to digest using iPhone but cannot copy paste (major
defect, IMHO.)
Still need to use two places to host mydomain.com on .Mac, for extra
cost and the effort described. Godaddy.com works just fine for
clarkmediation.com.

Dave Clark
Sent from my iPhone
714-293-5045