OK, so when using the iWeb “Publish To Folder” (ie: not to mac.com) option it does not get the RSS feed urls right. The on-page links to the RSS feeds will be munged up and the pointers that the RSS feed gives will be munged up as well. Charming. A known fact. Thanks Apple! But, if you happen to be hosting your iWeb produced website on an Apache webserver that you have control (or influence) over, there is a pretty easy fix to this little issue. Our friend mod_rewrite will take care of things.

If you have named your top level site name “Example” and are publishing to the url “www.example.com”, all the links will work – mostly. Your sub-page named “Blog” will be reachable at:

http://www.example.com/Blog/ (as it should be)

however even if you tell the “Publish To Folder” dialog (as you are supposed to) that your site is:

http://www.example.com/

iWeb will try to force your RSS URL to (as it should not be):

http://www.example.com/Example/Blog/rss.xml

as well as making incorrect links in RSS feed itself.

If you can get all up in the Apache config, the following directives will take care of the problem once and for all (where “Example” == the name of your top-level site name):

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/Example/(.*) /$1 [R,L]

iWeb in certain circumstances is putting the name of the top level site page into the URL as it should not be doing. This simple rewrite rule will take care of this particular mistake.

Caveat: this will now work if you have a sub-page with the same name as your “top-level” page name.

From experience, I know that hand-coded/programmer-generated html is better than that which tools like this can produce, but this is really egregious. Of course, the problem does not surface if you are “publishing” to mac.com, but I thought that Apple prided itself on not acting like Microsoft.