Annoyingly Dependable Software
Admist all the praise I can bestow upon Sandvox, this software is not without its frustrations. Is it oxymoronic to enjoy, even depend upon software for business while being annoyed with the prospect of using it? Sure. People do it all the time with Adobe products. Regardless of the application, top gripes are stability (crashes), performance (slow), and upgrade fees (expense).
Karelia Software, makers of Sandvox cannot be criticized for upgrade fees. For more than 2 years it has forked out updates at no cost to loyal customers. The biggest annoyance is Sandvox crashing. To be fair, a couple of my websites boast more than 350 pages each using Sandvox on an Intel Mac running Tiger (10.4.11). Though spry with smaller sites, Sandvox can become sluggish editing large directories (called Collections) and auto-saving or updating its internal database after publishing a site. For large sites with more than 50 pages, Karalia recommends Leopard (10.5.x) or Snow Leopard (10.6.x).
Minimizing 13 Sandvox Annoyances
With over two years of experience using Sandvox, I want to share some practical advice and a few workarounds. Because development performance varies according to Mac OS version, your mileage may vary.
- Buy Sandvox Pro: There should be no other option. The $40 difference is not worth the additional frustration. The Pro version allows users to edit HTML code. Automatically generated code needs to be examined and edited. Two areas where Sandvox gets sloppy is reapplication of links and indiscriminate use of the non-breaking space tag ( ). Having access to HTML allows you to tidy up malformed code.
- Most of the default site designs are gaudy: iWeb has much cleaner looking templates. Don't limit yourself to the ones that come with Sandvox. Pay for some offered by third-party developers or build your own. These developers also provide guidelines for modifying CSS tags to alter font attributes. If you are not happy with any of the generated site headers, remove the text and build your own, saved as a JPEG or GIF.
- Increase Autosave interval: It is well worth the requisite hassle to enable a hack found on the Karelia website to adjust hidden preferences. I nearly abandoned my use of Sandvox because of 25-second autosave delays every 60 seconds in the middle of typing. My suggestion to Karalia is that autosave should be keyboard- and mouse-click-aware, only autosaving after a reasonable period of inactivity.
- Do not depend upon Autosave: Early versions of Sandvox had a virtually useless Undo command. With an entirely new code rewrite, Sandvox 1.6 enabled multiple Undos -- sort of. Quickly Undo (Command-Z) several operations in succession and you are likely to jump to the last manually saved state (clearing the Undo and Redo cache). Preempt this phenomenon by periodically performing a manual save and slowly undo no more than two or three times in a row.
- Clean up Sandvox code: Assign a link to a phrase; by default whatever is open in Safari is added (this can be disabled within Preferences). There is a neat looking neon blue squiggly line attached to a target icon that you drag to another page within your Sandvox site and it will keep track even through page renaming and relocation. Edit that link in the future and you must remember to press the small "x" to delete the original before selecting a new link and clicking elsewhere on the page. Otherwise you wind up with two links for the same phrase. (Note: When adding a directory link, you must wait for it to open before the link is accepted. To speed things along, click the disclosure triangle to open the directory before adding the link.)
When adding links or pasting text, Sandvox has a habit of inserting non-breaking spaces. This doesn't preview within the WYSIWYG window. Hence, your published site may show different line breaks than expected. There are other instances where access to the code comes in handy like building ordered or unordered lists and columns.
- Patient editing required: Sometimes it is easier to edit in HTML mode, to use the Find and Replace feature for example, or rearrange paragraphs without having Sandvox create a bunch of localized font style tags. Speaking of patience, there's more action watching grass grow than editing custom summary in the HTML editor. Until this is fixed, do WYSIWYG editing to improve sluggishness a little.
- Minimize RSS feeds: By default Sandvox assumes you want to the world to subscribe to most Collections (subdirectories) created. There are two problems with that: (a) You don't, and (b) It requires more time-consuming Sandvox resources to maintain its internal database for large sites. Decide where you need RSS feed and turn it off everywhere else. Even on a blog, a feed is likely only required on the current year.
- Reduce the number of pages in a collection: Merely clicking on a disclosure-triangle for a collection of more than a dozen pages can start the cursor spinning for at least a minute. If you anticipate more pages, organize your site with additional subdirectories. For example, place each month's blog entries in a separate directory. If you are more prolific, create weekly directories kept within monthlies that are placed within annual directories. Advance planning will prevent you from breaking established links elsewhere on the Web as content grows.
- Implement proper robots instructions: Once a page gets into the mighty cache of Google, et al, it can take weeks, months or years to remove. Google Webmaster Tools can speed the process but it is best to prevent search engine spiders from building cobwebs of broken links during that awkward development and testing phase. The easiest way to do this is to place a file called "robots.txt" within your site directory via FTP software. The text file should include the following phrase:
- Avoid the Collection Archive pagelet: There is something weird about this option. Firstly, it does not perform as expected. (Clickable links are not activated.) Secondly, it appears to slow publishing, saving, and increases crashes, presumably because of additional time to update the internal database. More oddly, if a Collection Archive is deleted, Sandvox continues to publish the archive indexes (visible via FTP software) when viewing the site directory.
- The meta keywords field is useless: Don't waste time adding on those clever keywords to pages in hopes of improving page ranking. Most, if not all, search engines have ignored them for years. You are better off writing appropriate text in the visible body of the page that includes the phrases you anticipate people will use when searching for the content found on your site.
- Validate code for potential errors: The best way to assure your site will render correctly in various browsers is to actually have different versions loaded on Mac, PC and Linux computers. Sandvox has eliminated a large chunk of the guesswork by producing W3.org compliant xhtml1-strict.dtd code during publishing. But with Sandvox Pro it is possible to manually add code. When typing within a Rich Text field, Sandvox attempts to correct malformed code. However, Code Injection or raw HTML pagelets can contain errors. Select View: Web View: Validate HTML (W3.org) to test your page.
- Close before publishing: When selecting Publish All, Sandvox does not need to compare changes for each page so uploads begin immediately. Similarly, if a global value is changed like the header, footer or Google Analytics code, all the pages are uploaded. However, particularly with large sites (but not exclusively so), Sandvox can take an inordinate amount of time analyzing content changes before performing selective page uploads. Each uploaded page must be flagged while maintaining differences between what has been published, the previously saved snapshot, and the currently open window.
By default, upon opening a Sandvox site and after publishing pages, a snapshot is autosaved. This means the site is duplicated as a temp file and the prior version is trashed. (Look at all the copies in your computer's Trash.) For a large file of 10 to 30 MB, this can take several minutes, perhaps giving the appearance that the application crashed. (Force quitting can get everything out of sync.) To minimize the number of versions for comparison and speed uploads, I recommend after making any page alterations, close the site window and reopen it before publishing. Before closing, manually save after publishing site; close and reopen before making additional changes.
User-Agent: *
Disallow: / # temporary content
"User-Agent" is the branded search engine crawler. You can specify them individually or use the asterisk wildcard to refer to them all. The slash following "Disallow" tells site crawlers not to index anything in the main directory (your entire site). The optional pound sign followed by comment is for annotating the command FYI.
In the absence of site directory access and FTP software (which is available for free), a meta tag can be added using Sandvox Site Code Injection. Click the Head Area tab and include the following instruction:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
This serves the same purpose as the robots.txt file so both should not be used. The difference is that the meta tag is added to all page headers as opposed to a single text file. Hence the crawler must access every page to learn they should not be indexed. Once your site has been debugged and is up and running smoothly, you can remove the global robot exclusions and selectively add it to specific pages or directories.
A future article will praise noteworthy Sandvox features.