Crashing at upload

Question

On my MacBook, running Mac OS X 10.4.10 and iWeb 1.1.1, I can't seem to upload my site to .Mac any more. This weekend, I started having a problem with an "Unexpected error" at upload and spent quite a while determining which page was causing the problem (it was the most recent one) by publishing to a folder. Unfortunately, in the mean time I'd downloaded my whole site from my iDisk to the Desktop (just in case), deleted the files in my "Sites" folder on my iDisk and attempted to "publish all". Now, iWeb does finish "creating" all the pages and begins to upload the files, but at different points it keeps crashing iWeb. I tried to manually upload the files from the folder I published to my Desktop, but after 17 hours today and only going about 10% of the status bar, I gave up. (It wasn't really possible to do anything else while this was going on.) I'm not really sure what to try next. I suppose I could try uploading while I'm at work tomorrow to eliminate my AirPort/Clearwire network as part of the problem. But any other suggestions would be appreciated.
-Doug

Answer 1

Doug,
Sorry you are experiencing this horrendous aggravation.
iWeb is a fantastic web building tool, as you know. It's fast, easy, and integrates beautifully with the rest of Apple's iLife suite. It's major fallacy is the one you are experiencing now--the inability to keep and publish sites separately. When you run into a problem with one site, it affects your ability to manage all of your sites, when publishing to .Mac from a single Domain file.
In my opinion, it's time to split up that gigantic Domain file. Actually, it's amazing to me that you have been able to maintain and publish updates to 20+ sites for this long with no major problems.
In your first go 'round with splitting up the Domain, you ran into one of iWeb/.Mac's quirks--sometimes other sites get "erased" on the first round of publishing. (Now you tell me...! right? Gee THANKS.)
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=2541090
I guarantee you that once you have split the Domain into individual Sites' Domains, you will be much happier with the arrangement. I personally prefer the manual folder method. I have 25+ Domain files, with a blank Domain available that I duplicate and use when I want to create a new site.
Contray to what I have recommended in the tutorial, stay away from the Publish All to .Mac command for now. As you separate off your sites into individual Domain files, just use the Publish to .Mac command for each site. I promise you that iWeb will put up each site individually, and cleanly, to .Mac.
Once you get through this grind of putting up your 20+ sites, you will be glad you did, and it may well go a lot faster than you think. You will be able to be able to open, edit, and publish/update only one site at a time and everything will go faster. Moreover, when you encounter a publishing problem, it will be much easier to deal with as you will only be working with a single site, and a single Domain.sites file.
Keep posting back for us. We'll give you all the help that we can.
Mark