Posted on Thu - November 17, 2005

Tweaking Mac OS X


The good news is that I found out what was causing the update problems for Pagan Vigil.

It wasn't my cable company or Itsamac.

It turns out that iBlog hands off a good deal of it's work to the Mac OS, and the standard OS X uses a buggy UNIX FTP transfer program.

That makes sense if you stop to think about it, Apple wants to make money, so they have poured most of the integration efforts into Apple iDisk. And to "encourage" newbies to use iDisk which is so easy, there is a sub-optimal FTP transfer built into the OS. It will work (sort of) for smaller sites.

Anyway there is a freeware Unix program that fixes the problem and makes FTP uploads much faster. And since it is Apple and Unix we are talking about, it is much easier to tweak than Windows would be. Just be careful.

The standard FTP transfer in Mac OS X is behind the state of the art. For large blogs like Pagan Vigil, that can mean that it takes forever to update the site. Fortunately there is an easy fix, but it is buried in iBlog's online documentation.

Just download and install NcFTP client for Macintosh.

You don't have to do anything else, uploads speed up and no more hanging.

I was beginning to get very frustrated, this seems to have fixed things.

The bad news is that Pagan Vigil is now several hundred pages, which currently takes about a half hour to completely reload the site. There is some jerkiness I want to fix, I want to refine the feel, and I want to get the all the banner graphics preloading. That will take some time for me to do, and it will probably knock the site out each time.

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