Murphy Mac

At some point Murphy stopped placing Quicktime videos in iWeb pages and turned to Google Video. Too many people emailed and said, “Great site. But the video wouldn’t play.” It doesn’t happen now.

Some people might argue that Flash-based Google Video isn’t much better. But in Murphy’s experience a Windows audience is more likely to have success with Google Video than with Quicktime. Despite Apple shipping Quicktime with every iTunes download the QT player isn’t everywhere - not yet.

There’s a trade off. Google doesn’t give you many options. Once you upload your video it’s in Google’s hands. Before uploading you can add a title page or a skin. But there’s no denying that Quicktime generally looks better.

Some people suggest leaving your video as uncompressed as possible before uploading. Their reasoning is that Google’s technology will do a better job at compression if they have more to work with upfront. It’ll take you longer to upload your video, but the results could be worth it.

Google’s default embed settings are often smaller than what you uploaded. On the plus side, the smaller size will look sharp. You can change the playback size by altering the html. Murphy shows you how in the screencast.
Here’s another reason to use Google Video - it won’t count against the stingy disk space you get with .Mac! Murphy knows .Mac is perfect for some users - and offers Mac-specific features you won’t see elsewhere. But if lots of storage space is what you need look elsewhere!

The screencast uses iWebMore to place html in iWeb pages. It’s quick and easy to use - but you might want to check Murphy’s first iWebMore screencast.

Click to see the iWeb page made in the screencast.

With iWeb it’s easy to make fantastic looking content in a matter of minutes. To keep things simple, iWeb never shows you a single line of html. For some that’s good. For others it’s frustrating.

If you check around on the web you’ll find some workarounds. A common theme: Put a placeholder on your page - like a word that will stand out. After publishing you can scan your html for the standout word and replace it with whatever html code you want on your iWeb page.

Murphy’s going to make it even easier. He’s using a free tool called iWebMore. We’ll put a rounded-rectangle on the page as a placeholder. We’ll add the html inside the rectangle, then let iWebMore do the dirty work of updating our html after we publish.

You could use this method to add all kinds of code scraps. Digg buttons, videos, Adsense banners - all kinds of content. Even just a few simple lines of html that iWeb couldn’t do for you. Suddenly iWeb isn’t half as limited as you once thought.

Remember, you’re altering the pages after you publish. That means if you publish again you’ll have to process your pages again using iWebMore to update the html. iWeb doesn’t know you altered the html.

In the screencast we’ll add a small piece of Google script to our page that pulls our favorite stories from Google Reader. As we mark stories as favorites in Google Reader, our iWeb generated page will update with new links. This is a great way to keep your site fresh, and provide your readers with content that interests you.

Down the road we’ll take a look at making the changes manually. For now, iWebMore makes it really easy. Who knows, maybe the next version of iWeb will take care of this for us??

Related information: See the screencast for automating iWeb syncing with a third party host.

Lots of people used to use Google for their start page. Now that our browsers have Google built-in the home page is up for grabs.

So make your own start page, and spread your favorite sites across it. Use big, easy to click images. You can add text links for sites you don’t visit quite so often.

This little project used to be a hassle, even with semi-friendly web editors like MS Word. iWeb makes it incredibly easy to lay out the images and publish your new home page.

If you make a really good one go ahead and post a link in the comments.

Your iWeb blog has an RSS feed built right in. But you can make it easier for your readers to subscribe to it. This screencast shows how to provide links that add your feed to My Yahoo and Google homepage.

We’ll also look at making sure the RSS feed works when you publish to a folder instead of .Mac. If you’ve found the iWeb URL field confusing, we’ll clear things up. If you don’t enter the right URL in the field your iWeb RSS feed won’t work.

When you’re done watching, click Murphy’s Yahoo / Google links on his start page. You wouldn’t want to miss a post!

NOTE: If you’re here because the RSS feed on your iWeb blog doesn’t work, make sure you watch the second half of this screencast.

Today Murphy’s answering some reader mail. Steven wrote in because he couldn’t change the color of his hyperlinks using the iWeb interface. Apple doesn’t support changing the color in iWeb, but it can be done a couple ways.

You might have to watch this screencast twice to realize Murphy ultimately only changes one word in one file to perform this task. But along the way he shows you lots of stuff - and that might make this look complicated. It’s not.

What is the complication? iWeb doesn’t cooperate when you alter its output after publishing. But we can deal with that too.

You might want to watch yesterday’s screencast before proceeding to get a handle on what CSS is all about. Or watch it afterwards if you have more questions. Either way, today’s screencast goes hand in hand with What is CSS?

There’s another approach too: Edit the templates iWeb relies on for its themes. Detailed instructions are available. Murphy will probably tackle this process in the next few weeks. If you take this route you avoid wiping out your tweaks the next time you publish from iWeb.

Here’s something else to consider - Put multiple domain files in play. Why would you want to do something so awkward?

Here’s why:

You publish site A from domain file A. You tweak the published files on .Mac. The next time you publish from .Mac the untweaked files replace the tweaked. Time to re-tweak.

Instead:

Publish site A from domain file A. Take domain file A offline. (rename it).

Create domain file B and don’t make any sites with the same name as site A. When you publish from iWeb to .Mac your site A will remain unchanged, including your tweaks.

If juggling your domain files sounds like too much trouble, take a look at iWebsites, a donation-ware product.

What’s a domain file you ask? It contains all your iWeb sites, in edit-ready format. You should be backing it up from time to time, Murphy covered this earlier.

One more warning: taking a site published to .Mac out of the folder you published to could break things like counters and blog comments. You should test that stuff first.

So Steven, you can change your hyperlink color, by changing a single word in a single file. Or you can alter the templates. What’s it going to be?

Everyone: Get your .Mac snippet requests in! Murphy has a trial .Mac account for 60 days!!