Wyodor @ MobileMe

Avoiding the iWeb Sitename in the URL

iWeb organizes and publishes its pages in Sites. It will append the Site name to the base URL of your webserver.

If you signed up for a webhosting-and-domainname package (not MobileMe) you can avoid the Sitename in the URL with sub-domains.

www in an URL is a sub-domain. Just as web in web.me.com is a sub-domain of me.com.

Note : It doesn’t work with MobileMe and Personal Domain. MobileMe doesn’t support sub-domains and the sub-domain in your CNAME will be ignored anyway.

Based on my experience to figure out how to avoid the Site name in the URL I wrote an article, or tutorial if you like, on how to do that.

In the article I describe what I got and what I did with my free webhosting package.

The article describes how I set up iWeb and fooled it to use the sub-domains, what extras needed to be done and what the drawbacks are in the end.

And in the very end it describes how I solved the drawbacks and why all of the above wasn’t necessary.

iWeb doesn’t know about all this. So you can happily keep publishing your webpages as before.

And it works. Having your cake and eat it too. Nice.

Below are three URLs. The base URL, the URL iWeb creates, and the sub-domainname URL. When you click a link note the changing of the URLs when it redirects to the right webpage.

http://dailynews.webege.com/
http://dailynews.webege.com/iweb/
http://iweb.dailynews.webege.com/ (the Tutorial)

To test an iWeb Site with a Blog RSS feed and iPhoto/Podcast subscriptions, proceed here :

http://dailynews.webege.com/holiday/

As a bonus there’s a short explanation of how to solve a PHP parse error when you publish an iWeb Site to a 3rd party host with an ill-configured webserver.

Sources : Apache htaccess and Apache Redirect directive

Note : Apple Macintosh Users can read the Apache manual on their computer. Start Personal Webserver and type http://localhost/manual/ in the Browserwindow.