| Just because Apple provides the tools for building your HomePage doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use them. If you want, you can design and build your web site and still host it online from your iDisk. The advantage to building your web site this way is that you have more control over the style, graphics, and layout of the web site, and you can use any tool you want from vi or BBEdit as a plain text editor for hacking your own HTML, or other WYSIWYG design tools like Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX or Adobe's GoLive. If you take on the task of building your own web site, follow these simple rules: -
The main page for your site (named index.html ) should be placed in the Sites folder of your iDisk. Do not use default.html as the filename for your main page as the .Mac servers won't serve that page if people try to load its directory. For example, if you place a default.html page in your Sites directory and point someone to http://homepage.mac.com/ membername , they will see an error message saying that the page could not be found. However, if you give them the link of http://homepage.mac.com/ membername /default.html, the page would be viewable in their web browser. -
You can either place all of the graphics files within a folder in the Sites folder, or you can store them in the Pictures folder. If you store your graphics in the Sites folder, just remember to use relative links when referring to other pages of your site. For example, if the HTML files for your web pages are in the Sites folder and the graphics are in the Pictures folder, you would refer to them with either of the following tags: <!-- Absolute Link --> <img src="http://homepage.mac.com/chuckdude/.Pictures/ psychomax.gif" alt="Picture of Max" height="100" width="500"> <!-- Relative Link --> <img src=".Pictures/psychomax.gif" alt="Picture of Max" height="100" width="500">
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If you try mixing .Mac HomePages with your own pages, be warned that you could run into problems, particularly if there's a conflict in filenames found in any of the directories. You should devise your own file-naming scheme and stick to that, but make sure that you're not using something that exactly matches the filenames used by the HomePage building tools. -
To add your own web pages to an existing .Mac HomePage, click on the Advanced tab and select the External HTML theme (see Section 7.4.10, earlier in this chapter). |
