Adobe SiteMill 1.0, Part 3
Site Management Made Easy
by Marshal Rosenthal
It's important to note that the program can't undo this command, so care must be exercised, and that changes will also be updated in Page and Image windows if opened in the Site window. You can view files by looking at their names, and if you want to change a graphic, double-clicking will bring up a requester to help you find it.
In the Errors window, SiteMill shows all of the files that can't reference a link assigned to them. These broken links are noted in red, and correcting them automatically removes them from this window. Doing this is easy; you just click on the link that should be connected to the file in the Site window and drag it on top of the corresponding file name in the Errors window. The other option is to double-click on the broken link, which brings up a file requester and lets you find the file that will fix the link.
The final window displays links to external sites. Since SiteMill can't browse, checking this requires that you have your site uploaded and running on a server so that you can access it with a browser online (Netscape, Explorer, etc.). If a link has gone bad, such as a changed URL, you must make a note of this and then return to SiteMill. Fixing a bad link is similar to the operation in the Errors window; you select the External References window, click on the URL, then type in the new name. SiteMill checks for all the links between this changed URL and the entire site, then updates them as needed.
Wish List
Considering how "human-engineered" SiteMill is, it's a shame that there's no easy way to send files up to the server to get the site online. Adobe provides information and tips on using ftp and Fetch, but a single button would have been much more elegant. It's also worth noting that since SiteMill automatically saves everything that is being changed on the fly, the lack of a manual Save could cause a potential problem should your system crash in the middle of a change (this is not the case with the Page and Image windows). Also, SiteMill can't repair links inside a file that is locked, but the program does warn you of this when loading. And not being able to use SiteMill online is also a bit of a nuisance when checking for external links.
Still, there are few programs that do what they're designed for as well as SiteMill does. There's no question that Adobe's program is a real winner for Mac (and soon Windows) Webmasters in the tedious and time-consuming task of updating and maintaining Web sites. A program doesn't have to be complicated to be powerful, and SiteMill is powerful indeed.
Marshal M. Rosenthal, a photojournalist based in New York City, spends his days playing with multimedia and high tech.
Reprinted from Web Developer® magazine, Vol. 2 No. 2 May/June 1996 (c) 1996 internet.com LLM. All rights reserved.
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