Help! I'm going to be hit with an enormous number of visitors and my iWeb website makes dumb .png decisions!

April 19, 2012 2:49 AM

Is there any way to make iWeb name my image files something other than shapeimage_1.png, shapeimage_2.png, etc? Alternately, is there any way to make iWeb reuse images instead of reloading a copy of each image for every page it's on?

I have a fairly graphics heavy website that's about to land on Lifehacker's front page in 8 hours. I'm trying to prepare for the onslaught, and I found this neat tool over here: http://www.pkclsoft.com/pkclsoft/iWebIO.html

But iWeb names all my main images shapeimage_1.png, shapeimage_2.png and this program isn't quite complex enough to figure out which images are *actually* the same and so it deletes a bunch of images I don't want it to delete. If every image had a unique name, it would probably work. Any ideas?

Any other ideas for preventing death by lifehacker would also be appreciated!

posted by sdis to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Is it just the names that are an issue? Why?

I'm not sure what the problem is, other than that you have some images that are duplicated?

I'm guessing you're using straight HTML for the site, so you probably don't need caching or anything, like you might on a CMS.
posted by backwards guitar at 4:40 AM on April 19, 2012

I'm using a cms too, but that's already cached. The static site is around 12 mb in total, and I'd guess that 6mb is in duplicate images.

The names are an issue only because the only tool I've found that fixes the duplicate image issue relies on names to fix the issues (and therefore doesn't work in my situation)
posted by sdis at 5:16 AM on April 19, 2012

Okay. Well, ImageOptim might help you minimize the size of some of the images at least.

Not too familiar with iWeb - how many pages of content do you have? Too many to manually point multiple references to the same image? I'm thinking you could use something like TextMate, which lets you search files in a project, search for shapeimage_1.png and change

/folder1/shapeimage_1.png
/folder2/shapeimage_1.png
/folder3/shapeimage_1.png
... etc.

to all point to

/folder1/shapeimage_1.png
posted by backwards guitar at 6:50 AM on April 19, 2012

I've been looking at this service recently that is designed to take the load off of your web server when serving static content, like the images you mention.

It seems perfect for coping with sudden bursts of high traffic like you'd get being linked from a popular site like Lifehacker. There's a free plan that would do for this purpose.

Not affiliated with the company at all - just been evaluating the service.
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 7:59 AM on April 19, 2012