Publishing Problems
There are several publishing problems that crop up every week on the RapidWeaver forum. The most common is probably the “Failed to create Remote Directory” error message, and that is almost always down to a wrong entry in the FTP details for your site, in the ‘Publish Settings’ dialog. If you get this error, be sure to check that you’ve typed all the information (username, password etc.) your hosting company provided you with into the dialog correctly. Even if you know you did it right, delete it and re-enter it by hand, without copying and pasting from anywhere. Nine times out of ten, this will fix it. If it doesn’t, then it’s more than likely that the information in your Mac’s “Keychain Access” application has become corrupted. Use Spotlight to find “Keychain Access”, hit Return to launch it, and then find the keychain information pertaining to your site in the ‘Login’ list, and delete it. Then re-enter it in RapidWeaver, typing by hand, not copy and paste, and you should be set. RapidWeaver will make a new Keychain entry for it in Keychain Access.
Another frequently-encountered glitch is the ‘Path’ setting part of the login information. This confuses a lot of people. Sometimes, in the ‘Welcome’ email you got from your hosting company when you signed up with them, they will refer to this as the ‘Directory’. What it means is the folder that’s the ‘root’ of your site, the place where all your web site files need to go. Different hosts have different names for this folder: some call it public_html, others call it httpdocs, and sometimes it’s just a forward slash /. You need to make sure you get this right. Your hosting company can tell you this easily, or you should be able to find it on their site. There’s the definitive text about this here at the Realmac website, along with some good hints and tips on other things to check.
The other common upload problem occurs when RapidWeaver fails to upload one or more CSS stylesheets. Your text and images will appear, but without any structure to them; it will look as though the RapidWeaver theme you used is not there. This is just a glitch that happens now and then, and it can easily be solved by going to the ‘File’ menu, choosing ‘Mark All Pages as Changed’ and after that, in the same menu, choose ‘Re-Publish All Files’. In the unlikely event that that doesn’t fix it, do it again. And if it’s still not right, use an FTP application such as the excellent donation-ware Cyberduck to go into your root folder and delete your entire site, being careful not to delete any folders that your host has put there. If you’re not sure what you can delete, open your site’s ‘Export’ folder and take a look at the folders and files that make up your site, and compare them to the view in the FTP application when you’re logged into your site. Then, having deleted your entire site, mark all pages as changed in RapidWeaver, then hit the ‘Re-Publish All Files’ link.
Of course, it’s just possible that your hosting company has changed something on the server without telling you, something that prevents you from uploading even if you’ve followed through on all the above. If that’s the case, I’d look for a new host.
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