Making my personal website and course websites: iWeb + rsync

Author

Vinh Nguyen

Published

June 24, 2009

So I've been using iWeb on my macbook to create my personal webpage and potential course websites. I use it because i don't really know html, and i don't think I NEED to learn it right now. Point and click to create them is fine with me for the time being. Actually, I would prefer to create the pages in google sites, and export them to my professional-life host, ie, uci-ics domain. However, this option isn't quite available from google yet.

My main webpage is http://www.ics.uci.edu/~vqnguyen/, and from there, i can have my personal homepage and course websites hosted. However, when I use iweb to publish multiple sites to the same destination via the sftp option, things get funny because iweb puts a default index.html file in each directory, and this file directs u to a page. As i upload multiple sites to that one root domain, re-direction get's a little fuzzy. I fixed this by uploading the course websites first, then my personal site (root directory) last. Then, with every update, i just use "Publish Site Changes." However, what if i want to add some more pages? I didn't like this, and i finally did something about it.

Got my information from UCI's EEE help on iweb.

Now, what I do is this:

  1. ICS servers: websites are in ~/public_html/
  2. Created ~/public_html and ~/iWebSites on my macbook.
  3. Publish my sites to a local folder, ~/iWebSites, instead of using sftp, one directory for each site.
  4. After every update and publishing to my local folder, i run the following script (supposing my i have two sites, one personal, and one for a class website):
#! /bin/bash

rsync -progress -av ~/iWebSites/Vinh_Q._Nguyen/ ~/public_html/
rsync -progress -av ~/iWebsites/stat8 ~/public_html/
rsync -progress -av -e ssh ~/public_html/ vqnguyen@chi2.ics.uci.edu:~/public_html/

Now things work great! Good thing i have passwordless ssh!

Next thing to try is html in org-mode (emacs), which i found out through Michael Zeller's comment on here (he makes his website with it).