First of all, feel free to skip to the end for the solution. Please leave a comment if this helped you in any way (or not).

My Dad recently bought a Mac and designed a website in iWeb. When it came to publish the site I configured it and hit “publish”. Up popped a message telling me that the site was now live at “<sitename>.com/site”. Mmm I thought, I must have made a mistake when configuring it. I went back and checked the settings and found in actual fact this is “just the way it works”

Rubbish!

I Googled the situation and found that using the only way people were getting around this issue was to upload their website in an FTP client like Cyberduck. All well and good, but hardly the most tidy solution.

I decided to go about this a different way, by telling the server that instead of looking in the “www” folder as the root of the site, it should instead look inside the “site” folder.

This was achieved by creating a “.htaccess” file inside “www” (or “public_html” as it may be). You need to edit the next bit to fit your site, but you get the idea:

RewriteEngine on
#
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/site
RewriteRule (.*) /site/$1 [L]

Note: make sure you keep the slashes the way they are, they look odd but they are needed.
This simply tells the server to look inside the iWeb created folder whenever anyone goes to your site. Set this up once and you should be able to forget about it from then on, it just works.

I hope this helps people resolve an issue that really should not be there in the first place. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

Social media has been embraced by businesses small and large. It is great to see this and it is wonderful to see an interaction between supplier and provider that we have never seen before. All of a sudden it seems like companies actually do care what people are saying about them and they do care about their issues.

Unfortunately this embracing of social media also seems to be being abused. Time and time again I am seeing tweets such as :

“Win an iPad, simply retweet #SpammingCompany”

Really? Would people really do this?

It seems they will.

All of a sudden there are tweet after tweets going out with said companies advert. Whichever way you slice it, this is spam. It is an advert from a company that people did not sign up to receive.

Would these same people be so quick to send out the companies advert to all their friends email addresses if there was the carrot of a “free ipad”? Would they spam their friends in traditional methods? Possibly, but I think a lot of people would think twice about it.

It is a shame that companies are abusing social media in this way. If every company started behaving like this then Twitter would end up with such spam-noise that it will cease to be useful/interesting/engaging, and all you will get is tweet after tweet of people begging for iPads/iPhones etc.

Yes, it is very cheap advertising for a company, and gets the word out very quickly, but it is not what social media is for, and de-values the content on the social media platform.

#RantOver

It looks like a member of the Dev Team called pod2g has discovered a vulnerability in the booting mechanism for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices meaning that a jailbreak for iOS 4.1 is just around the corner.

The Dev Team have been producing jailbreaks for the iOS devices for a long while, but what makes this exploit extra special is it is hardware based, meaning that Apple cannot simply update the Operating System and fix it. Any of the aforementioned devices can (and will always be able to) be jailbroken.

This is a major coup for the jailbreaking community, as there has been talk of Apple clamping down on jailbreaking and making it much harder to do.

One thing that may hamper their future efforts is the advent of the Gaming community on iOS. This is something that has enforced legality in the gaming community in the past, as once a device has been detected as being exploited it could (in theory) be black listed from the gaming service. That said, if they had the ability to do that with games, then they also have that ability in Apps too, but as yet Apple have not played that card.

Some cynical people also believe that behind the scenes Apple don’t really mind the jailbreaking going on, providing the majority stay towing the Apple line.

Rumour has it the jailbreak will be with us within a day or so.

I sat down to watch the Apple presentation last week, interested to see what new products and software releases Apple are coming out with. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the new iTunes 10 logo.

Now I am not one to get all upset about these things like a lot of people on Twitter/Facebook/Forums etc, but as soon as it came up on the big screen I just LOL’d (yes, it really WAS out loud!). This thing looks like it was designed by an (underachieving) school kid. The first “web 2.0″ tutorial I saw on the web did a better job of making a logo look good.

I can see why they wanted a new logo. The old one has a picture of a CD, and let’s face it, when was the last time we consumed music via CD (yes, I know there’s always one!)?

I could understand if they replaced the CD with an iPod or something. I can even understand the use of a musical note, but this is your bog standard “gel button” with a flat note dumped on it with a bit of glow added for good measure.

I saw a tweet where someone recommended a replacement icon, and immediately you can see it took more than 5 minutes to design:

http://dribbble.com/shots/51446-iTunes-10-Replacement-Icon

At first glance you can see straight away it is a lot more modern (dare I say it, “funky”!) and also encompasses the social media angle of the new Ping service. This icon would not look out of place on any Mac Dock.

I was trying to think how on earth this gel icon go the thumbs up and the only thing I can think of is Steve designed it. I have seen it time and time again where a client thinks they know best. I am sure a lot of you have too. You know the conversation…. “can you make my logo BIGGER?!”.

This has to be a similar situation, and we all know that at Apple nobody argues with Steve Jobs (not for long anyway).

I’d love to hear peoples views on this issue, as I am sure there are many, but looking at the amount of blog posts that have popped up discussing this it is quite clear what people think of it.

I just find it bizarre that a company founded on (and obsessed with) the fit and finish of their products can produce something as laughable as this.

I sense an iTunes 10.1 around the corner, with a slightly more polished logo