If .mac was a fine pair of trousers and iWeb was the starched pressed shirt, then of course to complete the look, you’d need some stufflinks! No, not like when you link to someone else’s website, I mean links to your own stuff! Want to guess at how many ways there are to do this? That’s right, approximately one Linktillion ways! For simplicity, I’m only going to cover the two that means the most to iWeb users, the “Enable-as-a-hyperlink-choose-a-file” way and the “iDisk connnection” way.

Now, the “Eaahcaf” way is very simple. You select the object or text that you want to be the carrier of the link, then in the Link pane of the Inspector, click Enable as a hyperlink. Below that, change the Link To: to A File then navigate to your file on your system, choose the file and you’re done. If the link is attached to an object, you’ll see that small hyperlink arrow appear in the lower right corner of the object (unless you’ve rotated or flipped that object in which case I’ve no idea which corner it will be in but it will be in a corner). This arrow will not publish. It’s just there to remind you that this object is linked to something. If you were trying to apply a file link to text, well, something different will happen and I’ll point you to Apple’s knowledge base to find out what.

This is what we in the tech world would call “Well and Good” for most needs. iWeb takes care of uploading the file for you and places it somewhere on your iDisk so that when you publish, the file is there. Ease usually has a tradeoff, though. In this case, the tradeoff is that this doesn’t work quite as well when you want to link to the same file over and over on several pages.

That somewhere I spoke of above? Each page of your iWeb site has it’s own directory where the files for that page gets uploaded to. This directory is page_files, where page is the name of your page (A page named “happygolucky” would have the files associated with it stored in “happygolucky_files”). Now, imagine if you want to have a large .pdf linked from several pages. Well, if you’ve got 4 pages (a,b,c,d) it would copy the .pdf into a_files, b_files, c_files, d_files. This would take up 4 times as much space as needed! You only REALLY need to put it in one spot and just link to that same spot over and over.

Luckily, Apple has provided all .mac users with a convenient way of directing visitors a Public download area. If you replace username in the following with your .mac username and type http://idisk.mac.com/username-Public into your browser, you can access your iDisk’s Public folder. It’s displayed in a much friendlier interface than the old Homepage version and is a great way to point people to files to download. You say you don’t want to do it that way? You say you want a user to click a link and download a file directly? Well, you’ve probably found other directions out there will use the old http://homepage.mac.com style of links, but, knowing the .mac/iWeb guru you are, you want to know how to use the same style as the iDisk link above (because idisk is both cooler AND shorter than homepage).

This is where it gets kind of complicated so you’ll want to follow closely. If you want to link to a file named myfile.txt, place that file in your iDisk’s Public folder and use the following URL to link directly to it.

http://idisk.mac.com/username-Public/myfile.txt

And, if you want to place groups of files in a subdirectory to help keep track of them?

http://idisk.mac.com/username-Public/subdirectory/myfile.txt

Ummm, ok, so maybe that wasn’t so complicated after all. Just take the same link that takes you to your download interface (username-Public) and add the filename and, if necessary, the directory name. One thing to remember is that, since this IS your Public area, anyone who knows your username can access all the files in your Public area (if it’s not password protected) so keep that in mind.

If you want to do a bit of password protection, well, that’ll be upcoming. Until then, can anyone tell me where I can find some cufflinks that look like that netglobe?