iWeb officially sucks

My son Sam is an aspiring photographer and filmmaker (gee, what a surprise!) and he built a very nice website for himself in iWeb on his Mac. But when I tried to upload it to my web host (Westhost, whom I really like) and run it, it didn’t work. There was a generic “Error 500″ spit out from the server and nothing loaded. I tried with Westhost tech support, and they were unable to help me.

When I saved the website to my local hard drive and ran it, it worked fine.

So I put on my old debugging cap, and with the help of a 12 year old server I had running at a old client’s house (unreal it’s still cranking along!) I switched the server into debugging mode, and got a clue. And lo and behold, I discovered the problem in about 5 minutes.

iWeb puts the following line at the top of every HTML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

Evidently this horks the PHP parser on some Linux installations. Removing this one line from all of iWeb’s generated HTML files fixed our little problem, and Sam’s beautiful website is now live.

Check him out at http://sam.maller.com!