Reader Gary has a follow-up question to my recent entry about hiding iWeb pages. He writes:
Is it also possible to post a hidden page, without having the viewer of that page see the user name in the URL of your .Mac (or other) page (i.e. where they wouldn’t know to go to mac.com/joeblow/etc… and see your family pictures)? For instance, if you wanted to create a page with photos for an online forum that you participate with, but you don’t necessarily want to share your family photos and memories with them?
I approach this from the other way around. Apple and other media-sharing sites such as Flickr allow you to wall off areas of your life and expose them to just select groups of people—your family and friends, for example. I take advantage of this feature by password-protecting such iWeb projects as family photo albums, personal movies, and scrapbook-like blogs.
Doing so is easy in all versions of iWeb. Just select your site in iWeb’s Site list, choose View -> Show Inspector, click the Site tab, click the Password tab within the Site tab, and enable the Make My Published Site Private option. Enter a username and password for your site and email the site’s address and username and password to your nearest and dearest. If someone does manage to guess or learn the URL of your site, they’re still blocked by the username and password requirement.