Simple solution to getting advanced features working on iWeb 1.1

Question

I've been rather frustrated with the problems with iWeb 1.1, but after a couple of hours of experimenting, I now have a solution and theory about the problem. For a quick summary, scroll to the bottom of the post.
I have a site with a small blog a few photo pages. Publishing all resulted in the errors so many other people have been getting. In desperation, I deleted my photo pages, removed the comments and search features, and published all.
It worked. Flawlessly.
Next, I turned the comments back on, which also worked. Clearly the problem isn't with them. Can't be with simply having images either, as several published pages had images. Neither can it be punctuation as I was getting failures with pure alphanumeric characters in page names and image comments (and even with blank image comments). The next obvious thing to eliminate was volume of images.
To test this, I recreated one of my photo pages with 12 images, instead of the usual 20. It worked! The photo page was there, the advanced slideshow worked and the comments worked fine. After that, I was able to add more images to the page and publish the changes without any problems. Adding more pages is fine as well.
You can check for yourself at http://www.jonathanboyd.co.uk (forwards to my .Mac account)
It seems that uploding too many images in one go results in a problem. It may be that iWeb is timing out after a certain time and assuming that the upload has failed. Faster connections or uploading in smaller chunks would allow the upload to complete before the timeout.
To summarise:
The problem seems to be with uploading too much in one go. Get around it by publishing a small site to start with, then gradually adding photos in chunks of around 12 at a time. It'll take a while to get it done, but your site will work with all features.
I realise that this is probably a little frustrating for anyone with a lot of photos on their site, but if it is just iWeb being impatient, then hopefully it'll be trivial for apple to fix. Could also explain why they missed it in testing, if they have nice fat pipes and are next to the servers.

Answer 1

Judging by the number of people that are experiencing these problems, I wonder if the Apple .Mac servers are simply getting overloaded by everyone trying to publish the entire contents of their web sites to take advantage of the new features at the same time.
It looks very much like a network time-out related issue and because iWeb doesn't allow you to retry uploading failed files, you are less likely to encounter the problem with small incremental updates rather than large ones. Also, this means that whenever the upload fails you have to start all over again, which must be adding to the load on Apple's web servers, further compounding the problem.
I have made a couple of bug reports/enhancement requests via iWeb's feedback facility suggesting that the error dialog be given a 'Try Again' button and that files are uploaded as zip archives to try and reduce the round-trip delay that is incurred when uploading hundreds of individual files, as is currently the case. Maybe if more people make similar suggestions then this problem will be resolved quicker, making the whole publishing experience more efficient and less error prone.
In the meantime, perhaps the best thing is just to sit tight and wait until the .Mac servers are responding more quickly again some time next week...