A Mac problem,,,,,,,,,mac.com idisk problems

Jane, I know they have been having server problems this week due to the enormous number of windows users logging on to use iTunes.

If it persists, I would go the Apple support forum–there is a special private moderated forum for .mac members.

Hi, Jane. I just found this:

This just worked for me, running OS 9.1

1. Select Chooser from the Apple Menu.
2. Click the AppleShare icon.
3. Click the "Server IP Address . . ." button.
4. In the dialog box, enter "idisk.mac.com" (without the quotes). Note that it’s all lower case.
5. In the login dialog box, enter your .Mac user name. (If your .Mac email address is "", you enter only the first part: myname). Also enter your .Mac password. Click Connect.
6. Click OK to the next dialog box. Do not check the box beside your user name.

Jane,

I just noticed from your screen shots that you are trying to sign on as "Jane Carter", when in fact your actual user name is "janec3". Try signing in with just that.

Joe

Also Jane, I’m pretty sure you can’t directly access your iDisk by just typing in the URL as you did in the second screen shot. I’ve never been able to in the past and I just tried again without success. You need to set up an iDisk FTP page through Homepage first.

Joe

Jane,

Here <http://www.mac.com/> is the page I go to. Click on Support , give your password, click on Discussions, click on Tech support, then you have your choice of tech moderated forums including one on iDisc. I have been learning to use HomePage and the moderator has been helpful to me.

Its a little unclear to me why you need iDisc access. If your goal is to use .MAC for posting pictures, I don’t know you need to use iDisc. I have published a few web pages by now and if I go through iPhoto, I only need HomePage and its pretty simple. If you want to post albums made with other software, such as a photo album using PSE 2, you have to use the Sites focus and I have not mastered that yet, but don’t need to either at this time.

I think once you find the moderated .MAC forums you will be on the way.

Carl

Its a little unclear to me why you need iDisc access. If your goal is to use .MAC for posting pictures, I don’t know you need to use iDisc.

That’s true Carl, but there are advantages to accessing your iDisk directly. In Jane’s case, the biggest reason for accessing her iDisk is that she’s using OS 9. iPhoto is an OS X only app, so she needs a way to get her photo’s copied to her iDisk.

I’ve created a couple of picture pages with iPhoto but I prefer to drag and drop them to my iDisk’s Pictures folder first and then use Homepage to create pages. In iPhoto you only have five theme options where with Homepage you have 17 (you can, of course, after publishing your iPhoto generated page fire up Homepage and change the theme).

Another reason she might want to access her iDisk is to share a PSE generated PDF slide show (or any other file for that matter). In order to do this she needs to set up an iDisk file sharing page (FTP) and you can’t do that with iPhoto. I also use this option for sharing full size images. I have reletives spread all over the country and I keep them up to date with my images galleries. The problem is that in order to keep page load time to a minimum I don’t post high rez/large images. If one of my relie’s wants a copy of one of my images, I just upload the image to my iDisk and make it accessable for FTP download. I can also just email the image but I hate to clog anyones email with large file attachments.

Of course there is always the other iDisk folders: Movies, Software,Documents and Sites. I back up all my important documents to my iDisk and use the Movie folder to share movies of my kids with my far-flung reletives.

If Jane wants to create and post a web gallery generated with PSE, she needs to access her iDisk as well.

So, IMO there are lots of reasons why she might want to access her iDisk. You’re right, though, that if all she wanted to do was post images (and she was using OS X) she could do the same with iPhoto. I personally think that being able to access and utilize your iDisk offers much more flexibility.

BTW Jane, have you been able to access that sucker yet?

Joe 🙂

Hi Joe and Barbara, You hit the nail on the head! It worked. First, Ray Robillard said that the name was wrong, put in janec3, I did it and bingo, Connect! Uploaded my pictures into my idisk around 0630 this morning. Everything was indeed slow, and actually had trouble accessing this forum, finally got here about 0930.
Yes, Joe, you explained what I need the idisk for; I would love to have a few pages here and the flexability is better than pbase(I do love pbase dearly). I still have to figure out how to get my PSE pdf slide shows to work, they are in my disk, but not on the page yet. I will review your instructions. I have several PSE web galleries that I need to refine and get ready too. I do have some older albums here, that I should either delete or organize better.
I don’t have iPhoto yet, I am still using 9.2.2, but plan to get a new iMac for Christmas, at least that is what my husband wants me to have. Makes his shopping easy.

I think I shall like this mac.com account a lot, once I learn how to use it better. I will try to get the idisk FTP page going soon. Pbase sure has made me lazy.

Thanks again for all your wonderful help!
Jane

Joe, Jane, or anybody,

Thanks for the clarifications. If either of you have figured out how to post PSE web galleries or pdf slide shows please tell me how. I have read the instructions and the threads in the forums and I can’t figure it out.

Carl

Carl,

I’m going to assume you mean you can’t figure out how to post PSE galleries and PDF slide shows on your iDisk? I’m also going to assume you’re running a version of Jaguar.

PSE Web Galleries:

1. Mount your iDisk on your desktop. Choose Go>iDisk (from the Finder). Once it mounts it should open and you’ll see 9 folders with one being the "Sites" folder. If not just double click on the iDisk icon to open.

2. If you haven’t done so already, create your Photo Gallery in PSE. When I do this I always create a new folder on my desktop named for the photo gallery that I’m making (example: northshoretrip). I then have PSE place the finished photo’s, html pages, thumbnail photo’s, etc., into my new folder during the Web Gallery creation process.

3. Drag and drop the folder containing the gallery into your "Sites" folder on your iDisk.

4. Once the transfer is done, that’s all there is to it. The address of your web gallery will be something like this omitting the first and last bracket: [ http://homepage.mac.com/carlsutherland/northshoretrip/index. html]. (replace "carlsutherland" with whatever is your actual user name and of course northshoretrip with the actual name of the folder you created and that contains your web gallery). Now just type that in Safari and there you go!

PDF slide shows:

* *Understand that visitor’s to your site can’t actually view the slide show on-line through their web browsers. What you’re going to do is host the slide show on your iDisk for people to download to their computers and then view.

1. Mount your iDisk as in step number 1 from above.

2. Drag and drop your PDF Slide show into the "Public" folder of your iDisk.

3. Go to Homepage from your .Mac start page.

4. Under the Sites column choose Add (or if you want to just include the file sharing page in an existing site, select the site in the first column and then click the Add button under the Pages column)

5. If the slide show (or other file) isn’t something you want just anyone downloading, and you are creating a new site from scratch name the site in the next window and then click the On check box to require a password. Enter a password and then click the Create Site button.

6. You should now see your new site listed in the Sites column. Also note the sites web address which will be listed at the top of the window in blue text. With the new site selected, click the Add button below the Pages column.

7. Click on the "File Sharing" tab. Choose one of the 2 themes by clicking on either the graphite or magenta theme icons.

8. You should now see a page with a large folder graphic that says My iDisk along the left side and lists your PDF slide show in the window along the bottom. Click the Edit button along the top right. You can now type a brief description of your iDisk file sharing folder and change the name if you want.

9. When you’re done editing the page click Publish. That’s it!

Of course you can announce your new site/pages with iCard.

Joe

Joe,

Thanks. I wonder why Apple couldn’t make it that simple for the web photo gallery. Should I suggest they contact you to be a consultant? The PDF seems more complicated. I will have to walk through that to be sure I understand it.

Many thanks. That was a little work to type out. I appreciate it.

Carl

No problem Carl and if you need clarification on anything post back. It makes sense to me as I’m typing it out (because I’ve done it before) but you might interpret things differently. Let me know how you come out.

The PDF thing really isn’t much more complicated than using Homepage for posting image galleries. If you’ve ever done that you pretty much got it licked already.

Joe

Hi Joe, Thanks so much for the instructions! I already have one .pdf slide show and one web gallery sitting in my iDisk just waiting for me to read and follow your instructions. I am sure I will be using this more, so I will print out your instructions.
Jane

Your welcome Jane. Just be sure to post back if you find anything wrong with them. As I said in the post to Carl, it seems ok as I’m thinking through and typing the steps but you just never know.

Good luck!

Joe

Hi Joe, Your instructions are excellent, but I can’t seem to get it to work. I put the pdf slide show in to the Public folder of my iDisk, then everything went smoothly until the end, and I got ‘document contains no data’
The mac page is a bit confusing as I keep ending up with 2 folders with the same name. I may have hit
"add" under the wrong column, but I re-did it over again.

All the stuff that I put on last year, like this page is OK, <http://homepage.mac.com/janec3/PhotoAlbum5.html>
and this new one a few days ago,
< http://homepage.mac.com/janec3/MuffinsGrooming/PhotoAlbum8.h tml> I wonder why this page now seems to be inside MuffinsGrooming when it isnt supposed to be, nor was it yesterday.

The pdf and the web gallery aren’t cooperating with me and my mac.com The mac.com site is very very slooooowwww, so maybe I should try again early Sunday morning. I have one ‘index.html’ already so I had to try to make a new one as ‘index1.html’ Actually I think I will attack this tomorrow, as I am getting tired, and when I get tired, the brain slows down too. Thank you very much for the instructions, and I will go thru the process again tomorrow early.
Jane

Hi Jane,

document contains no data’ The mac page is a bit confusing as I keep ending up with 2 folders with the same >name. I may have hit

When I went to fool around on .Mac I got the same thing (I ended up with 4 folders in the site column with the same name). Apparently, even when you get that message, the site folder is created. I think this happens on occasion when .Mac servers get busy. I just went back to Homepage and deleted 3 of the 4 pages.

I’m guessing that you had your "MuffinsGrooming" site selected when you clicked the Add button under the Pages column and then added the PhotoAlbum8. I wouldn’t put it past Homepage to make an error and link the new page to the wrong site, but I’d be willing to bet that you had MuffinsGrooming selected.

I’ll be posting a PDF of the instructions, with pictures, soon. It might be a little easier to follow.

Joe

Hi Joe, Thanks again, I was wondering if I was really doing everything wrong each time. Your instructions weren’t the problem, it was the slowness and the quirks of the process.
Also back in the beginning, I had several other mac accounts, and they went poof and went away. I would have thought that they could have given us the opportunity to transfer the picture albums over to the mac.com pages. I would think that if Apple can make the best and easiest to run computers in the world, that they could create something that would be like pbase(enhanced), and easy to do.
Of all the ways to get our pictures on line, pbase is my favourite! It is so incredibly easy. You can even customize it, I made my own backgrounds, there is even a css template to use for customizing. And I sure don’t know much about that. I guess it isn’t like having your real honest to goodness web page, but it sure works like a charm.
I’ve even bought www.jcarter.net and GoLive 6, but that’s as far as I have gotten. I learn something new every day, thanks again, I will give it a whirl tomorrow. Jane

Ok Jane and or Carl, here’s the iDisk File Sharing instructions < http://homepage.mac.com/josephhenry/carlandjane/FileSharing4 6.html> in PDF (with pictures). It’s a fairly large file (2 mb) so be forewarned. Hopefully this will explain things a little better.

Joe

I had several other mac accounts, and they went poof and went away. I would have >thought that they could have given us the opportunity to transfer the picture albums >over to the mac.com pages.

They did Jane, back when they decided to start charging for .Mac. If I remember right, you had 60 or 90 days. After that time period, though, the only way to get at those accounts is to pay up for them. They probably still have your old account(s) saved for you if you ever decide you want them.

Joe

Hi Joe and Jane,

Boy am I impressed. That is first class Joe. Did you make that PDF file in PSE 2? I saw some areas of .MAC I’ve never seen. I’m with you Jane about Apple and .MAC. I find the computers and software and peripherals generally easy to use with the exception of .MAC. I think its the lack of illustrations that were presented here that make the original instructions so difficult for me. What a learning experience this has been.

Many thanks

Carl

Hi Joe, Awesome instructions! Thank you. Took only about ~15 seconds to download. I am going to try again and see if I can get this done right. I have seen some really nice albums on mac.com pages, and now maybe I can do some myself. It is a nice service, not too bad for $100/year, just wish it was more ‘user friendly’, but thanks to you, I will get more up there.
Also I don’t think I will retrieve the old account stuff, even if I could transfer the old albums, some of those photos are now on my pbase pages.

That file sharing part of mac.com is really neat, I will learn later how to put it on the web as a link the way you did with yours to have us download the instructions.

I still get confused with index.html and how to make several pages on one site, like having the / between the address and each page. I have just signed up for a class in December in HTML, so that should answer a lot
of questions.
Thanks again, Jane

Did you make that PDF file in PSE 2?

Carl,

I first take the screen shots with SnapzProX <http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox>. I then bring the images into PSE and "Save for Web" them all to reduce file size. Then I write up the instructions, with images, in Microsoft Word X. To create the PDF I just use OS X’s built in PDF creation tool from the Print dialog box.

I hope the instructions help you and Jane.

Joe

Hi Joe, I made both the pdf file and the web gallery with PSE 2. I assume that when I get my new iMac that I will have the OS X built in PDF creation tool? SnapzProX, I will buy. (I think I used to have it for os 8 on an old Mac down cellar.)Great little program.
I have just copied your instructions, as this pdf thing is really useful! Once I learn more, I hope to be able to use all these awesome goodies that all you people here use!
Thanks again for the great instructions!
Jane

Really nice job on the PDF, Joe, but what are all those .exe files doing on your idisk?

I assume that when I get my new iMac that I will have the OS X built in PDF creation >tool?

Jane,

Yep. It’s built right into print dialog boxes. It’s really handy. Oh and your welcome. I’m glad they were helpful.

Barb,

I design database’s on the side and those .exe files are FileMaker Pro stand alone runtime database’s for a few of my clients. The databases are for insurance sales and of course none of those guys own a Mac so I had to make them Windows compatible, hence the .exe.

Joe