Alias in Navigation bar?

Question

Hello All
I suspect the answer is no, but I'll ask anyway.
Having a site with lots of pages, I have sub-divided them into sub-sites on theme. This works quite well for me, until I want to call a page from a sub-site. Links are fine, but of course when that page loads, my link to the Home page is lost.
I have seen the suggestions about tricking the navigation menu with blank pages and pasting content, but this does not really suit due to the issues of content being overwritten if changes are made.
At the moment I get round this by creating a duplicate of the Home page and moving that to the sub-site. Amazingly the links all work OK (I think).
Naturally, what would be really cool is the ability to paste an alias to the Home page in the sub-site.
Has anyone found a way round this?
Adam

Answer 1

It actually wouldn't be nearly as hard as what I put in that first link above.
Let's say you have two sites, HomeSite and SubSite
You want HomeSite to have a nav bar link to SubSite/Openingpage.html and you want the SubSite nav bar to have a link to HomeSite/Openingpage.html
1. In iWeb:
Create a dummy page in HomeSite called "SubSite"
Create a dummy page in SubSite called "HomeSite"
Make sure the dummy pages are included in the nav bar.
Put something like "If you have reached this page, then I am in the process of updating the site. Normally, clicking Homesite/Subsite in the navigation bar would take you to my Homesite/Subsite. CLICK HERE to visit my Homepage and/or Subsite." (CLICK HERE = a text link to HomeSite/Openingpage)
Publish your site.
(Question: Are you publishing to .Mac or to a folder?)
2. Find your html files.
Go to iDisk/Web/Sites/iWeb/Sitename/Pagename.html
(If you publish to a folder, look in the folder you selected or try looking in your Sites folder of your home folder. )
There are two ways to handle accessing your iDisk.
Method 1:
Turn on local copy of your iDisk in System Prefs, with or without automatic syncing.
If you publish your site via iWeb, now the updated pages exist online but the old pages are on your local iDisk. You need to sync (automatically or manually) to get the new pages on your local iDisk (on your computer).
Then you can open the updated files, make your html changes in Text Edit or whatever program, and SYNC AGAIN (automatically or manually) to update the online version of the site to match what you have just changed on your local iDisk
Method 2:
Mount the iDisk when needed via the "Go" menu in Finder. This is the ONLINE VERSION of your iDisk, not a local copy. When you publish your site via iWeb, the changes INSTANTLY appear on the iDisk on your desktop. If you make html edits or other changes, they appear INSTANTLY online.
I recommend Method 2 - much easier!!!
3. Make the html changes.
You can open the html files generated by iWeb in any text or html editor. In TextEdit, to view the code in an HTML file, choose File > Open and select "Ignore rich text commands." Then locate the .html file (as described in step 2) and click Open.
For all the pages in "Homesite" except for Subsite.html, search for
href="Subsite.html"
Replace with
href="../Subsite/Openingpage.html"
(if you have blog or podcast pages in Homesite you will have to change ../ to ../../ for those pages)
For all the pages in "Subsite" except for Homesite.html, search for
href="Homesite.html"
Replace with
href="../Homesite/Openingpage.html"
(if you have blog or podcast pages in Subsite you will have to change ../ to ../../ for those pages)
Now open Homesite/Subsite.html
Find
</head>
Replace with
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=”../Subsite/Openingpage.html">
And open Subsite/Homesite.html
Find
</head>
Replace with
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="0;URL=”../Homesite/Openingpage.html">
If someone gets to these pages via Google or something, it will automatically redirect them to the correct page.
And don't forget to save your changes (not Save As, just Save)!!!
4. Remember, if you make a change to a page like this post-publishing, and later re-publish, you have to make the html changes again! Set up a Find/Replace command in MassReplaceIt and you can do this very quickly. You can save your queries so you can make all of your changes with one click the next time you save.
Download here:
http://www.hexmonkeysoftware.com