September 12, 2007
Whenever you create a blog, you know there’s a default entry created with it. You can give this entry your own name and change the text easily, but have you ever noticed that the published URL for the entry still uses the name of the default entry? Read about why this happens or watch the attached video!
In many of my templates, the default blog entry is named Travels Through The East so the URL when published would look like:
http://www.mysite.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2007/9/12_Travels_Through_The_East.html
Why would it do that when you named it Big Bird’s Small Adventure or Cookie Monster’s Day With Oscar?
Well, what probably happened is that that you copied and pasted your entry title from some source text outside of iWeb. And when pasting that text into the blog entry title text box, you pasted another text box with the text and not *just* the text itself. If that happened, then iWeb can only see the text box that was pasted and not the text that’s in it. Therefore, it cannot determine the actual name of the entry and defaults to the text embedded in the theme, Travels Through The East.
If you want to paste text into existing text boxes, you should always be sure you’ve copied text in the first place and not a text “container”. iWeb will allow you to paste text boxes within other text boxes, but when you do some special fields, like the blog entry title, will cease to work correctly.
Sometimes it’s hard to determine whether you’ve selected just text or selected the container along with it. It’s best to always double-click your text before copying it to make sure you’re getting the text itself. Then when pasting it, use SHIFT + OPTION + COMMAND + V to paste it. This will force iWeb to paste it while matching the style already set for the text box.
If you ever encounter this situation where the published URL does not match the title you provided, go back to your entry and examine the title text box to make sure you haven’t embedded a second text box within it by accident.
About This Article
This entry was posted by Suzanne on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 12:30 PM and was filed in the FAQ category using the tags: screencast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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As an aside, have you noticed that the way iWeb sets up a Blog means that the title of the entry is NOT the title of the link in Google? Do a search for “link unseen”. On that first page, you should find my “Applied Invisibility” story. Previously, that would have been “Link Unseen”.
Small change, but I noticed it :)
No I didn’t notice that. Berry interesting… oh my god you’re funny… causal temporal deferment… So what are you suggesting here? Or are you just calling out the fact that Apple has something in the published HTML that’s the same name as one of your blog entries? Sorry, still working through my morning coffee… I’m a bit foggy :D
Hello. Ok, I’ve got a question… My Aerolite templates are exporting pages with NO titles… I’ll have the pages named, and the page name shows in the inspector, but in the html that’s exported I get with either one or two spaces between.
I use massreplaceit to give my site a name, but my individual pages names are lost..
This is only on Aerolite, but not my other themes.
In iWeb 2.0, Apple has tagged one particular text box on the page as the “title” text box. They allow you to delete this off the page which I’m not sure was wise… maybe I should lock them onto the page, but that’s a side thought.
Anway, if for some reason you initially deleted the title text box when starting your design and then created a new text box… oh I see what you did. You probably did delete it because you have the fancy Aerolite image header in your header area.
See this is the problem with the way Apple implemented that special text box – you have no clue what it does and it looks and works like every other text box and you can zap it right off your page. But that particular text box (in Aerolite it’s the one in the header area) is what controls your page names. If the title text box is removed from the page, the page will default to the site name, not the name of the page you specified in the iWeb application.
This isn’t something I can control other than to lock the title text box to the page so no one can remove it.
It’s a quirky situation. If you’ve seen my iWeb Library site that was built with iWeb, you’ll see that I moved the title text box into the right bottom corner of my header. It’s TINY. I didn’t want it on the page, but it’s the only way to control the page name that appears in the browser so it’s on my page, albeit, very small.
You can try copying the title text box from another page to see if it’ll work on the pasted page. I have not tested this so I’m not sure if it will work, but that’s the only way to get that page name control back in place.
:-\
I’ll try starting with a fresh page, and then just add elements, not deleting any text boxes and see if that works..
I would think it would have been better to pull the page title from the inspector, but Apple probably thought that most people wouldn’t think to go there to name their pages.
Now, if Apple would hurry up and give us that context sensitive formatting bar, like Pages has…
I am having a problem with the title of my pages as well. But it’s a bit different than what’s reviewed in the video posted here. Here’s what’s happening:
I’m using Aerolite Sage. I created an initial blog page and then customized it for my desired look. I am attempting to use that original blog entry as a template for all of my new entries. I simply cntrl-click that entry from the blog titles area and then choose “Duplicate”. This effectively duplicates the page and my “template” is carried over. Now, I only need to update the text boxes to record my latest news.
This all looks great and seems to work from within iWeb. However, when I publish the site and visit the new blog entry it has the same page title (web url) as the original entry.
This doesn’t make sense to me. I make sure to update the “required” page-title text box from within iWeb.
Any ideas?
Copying the blog entry is a great technique for preserving the layout you like for your entries but what you’re describing might actually be an iWeb bug.
The page title for the browser title bar is not generated from the blog entry title. It should be, but it’s not. iWeb knows enough to copy the entry title text box correctly so that every blog entry gets a unique name, but it might not do that when it copies the text box that controls the title bar text.