After the excitement of the MacWorld announcements (especially the Mac mini), and some debugging and organizing of the new site, things are looking good. So here’s a progress report.

I hadn’t realized how much my local copy of the site had fallen out of sync with the remote copy. Part of this was due to my trying out several FTP applications and not really settling on a definite one. In the beginning (this was in the Mac OS 9 days) I’d tried Interarchy, when it still was called Anarchie, but the folder synchronizing feature was still unreliable, and when they went full commercial I decided it wasn’t worth the price. I wrote the main pages in DreamWeaver but found I had to watch and correct the HTML code all the time, and the site administration tools didn’t mesh with my style either.

So I sort of limped along, not touching the actual source files for months at a time – since most of the updates were done through the forum software – or checking out several FTP apps as they came out. In the end I stayed, mostly out of inertia, with RBrowser Lite, which is free and worked reasonably, if slowly. Editing individual files was made easy by using BBEdit‘s FTP option, which works very well.

Just how slowly RBrowser Lite was I realized only when I tested FTPeel a couple of weeks ago. There’s no comparison. Listings come up 10 to 20 times faster, and uploading a whole folder of small files has a similar ratio; it seems that RBrowser Lite simply stops for several seconds between every FTP command. On the other hand, FTPeel has several serious deficiencies; you can’t sort columns alphabetically, for instance, and uploading folders with lots of files sometimes left several files out; and the lack of sorting makes this very hard to find. Fortunately DreamHost stats are very comprehensive and after some head-banging I was able to find out which files were missing from the error reports. By the way, the FTPeel folks tell me they’re starting work on a completely recoded version which will fix my complaints; so stay tuned.

Still, in the meantime, I’m without a satisfactory FTP/site administration app, so there still may be some missing or misplaced files. Bug reports are welcome…