Multiple websites, multiple woes: Best IWeb 09/MobileMe strategy?

Question

I'm still a bit confused as to the best strategy for using IWeb 09's much-touted-in-reviews but apparently rather limited ability to publish to two or more separate MobileMe accounts.
In IWeb 08, I would set up several different user accounts on my Mac, associate each one with a separate MobileMe account from my Family Pack, and maintain separate domain files for each (all stored in the same folder on my hard drive, but given different names like "Domain_personal" or "Domain_business"). This worked fairly well, despite the inconvenience of sometimes not having a photo I wanted to use readily available, as it might be part of an IPhoto library that belonged to another account.
(I would generally log-in to the user account I wanted to use and work on the MobileMe domain file I had "assigned" to that account. But now and then I might forget, and start working on a domain file for the "wrong" Mac user account. That didn't seem to be a problem -- I could still save my latest changes, log out and then log in to the "right" user account, where I could publish my revised domain file to the intended MobileMe account.)
But in IWeb 09, my previous strategy is resulting in a slew of problems. Unexpected crashes. Or IWeb refusing to save a file after I've changed it (it just tells me the file cannot be saved, no explanation). Or images and/or video files that will suddenly go missing. Last night I found that one domain file/site I had published over and over with no problems in Iweb 08, now appeared to be a complete mess in IWeb 09 -- numerous missing images, including some png files that are apparently part of the Apple-supplied IWeb design template. Yet the graphics (mine and Apple's) were suddenly back when I opened that same domain file in another user account on my Mac.
So my IWeb 08 strategy does not seem to be working in IWeb 09. I guess an alternative would be: Do all my IWeb work in the same user account, swap domain files as I'd been doing before, and reset my MobileMe identity for that user account every time I want to publish. Or -- essentially the same thing -- use IWeb's ability to maintain multiple sites in the same domain file. But once again, I'd typically need to manually change my MobileMe identity to a different account at publishing time, to get an individual site going to the right place. And hope like heck that I don't accidentally mess up ICal, etc., by accidentally syncing to "wrong" Mobile Me account, to which I've logged in solely to accommodate IWeb.
Am I missing something here? Is there some logical reason why Apple would set up IWeb 09 to allow you to publish multiple sites, stored in one domain file, to various multiple external sites via FTP with ease? But make it essentially impractical to publish to several different MobileMe accounts, without the hassles I've mentioned?
It seems to me that if I want to use IWeb 09 for multiple web sites, the only sane thing is to drop my extra MobileMe accounts as soon as possible, and add some more external sites --- since (if you can do the RSS, etc., yourself) Apple has just made it so much easier to publish to anywhere-else-but-MobileMe.
Anybody have a different take on this? Or a better solution?

Answer 1

webalias rex wrote:
Anybody have a different take on this? Or a better solution?
The following may not be a better solution, but it does provide a different "take". I haven't tried it myself, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a fatal flaw in the idea. Anyway, taking that risk...
Since we don't know what, in iWeb '09, is causing your "slew of problems", it's not possible to say whether this proposed approach would make any difference. But in theory it would enable you to:
• maintain your separate Domain files
• publish to your multiple MobileMe accounts
• from the same user account on your Mac.
Take a look at this Apple doc:
MobileMe: How to publish a custom website
The idea is to publish your iWeb sites to different MobileMe accounts from a single Mac user account as +"custom websites"+ and, as that doc says:
"If you only plan to publish custom sites to your MobileMe account, you can make your site's URL shorter by placing your site (and its main index.html file) in the main Web/Sites folder instead."
...Presumably iWeb 09's integrated non-MobileMe publishing is FTP only, not WebDAV that iDisk requires. So you would need the free Cyberduck or pay for Transmit to publish your sites via WebDAV protocol to a MobileMe account's iDisk. And for a Domain you are about to publish, you would have to remember to use the appropriate MobileMe "destination" of the several you've set up to use in Cyberduck or Transmit.