Mac Users: Can you password protect individual photo- and podcasts?

Question

My husband is an educator and I am a photographer. We need to be able to give our clients access to their courses (podcasts) and sessions (photocasts) without letting the world be able to view them. However, we need to them to be accessible via the internet; most of our clients do not have Macs.

Basically, we need someone to be able to go to our .Mac website, click on a link for their particular podcast or photocast, and enter a password to be able to view it. How is this possible without password protecting the entire site?

I am more than competant on PCs, however, I am BRAND new to Macs, so detailed information would be very helpful as I am new to all of this.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is simple to do. There are 2 ways, depending on how you make your webpages. If you use iWeb, you can do the following-

1 - In the site organizer, select the site or one of its pages.
2 - If the Site Inspector isn't open, click Inspector in the toolbar (or choose View > Show Inspector), and then click the Site Inspector button. [TYGRESS' NOTE: It's a blue .Mac icon, and the left-most little button on the Site Inspector.]
3 - In the Site Inspector, click Password.
4 - Select "Make my published site private."
5 - Type a user name and password in the fields.
All visitors will use the same user name and password.

***IMPORTANT: Don't use your own .Mac user name and password.***

You will have to make seperate sites for each class and create a username and password for each site. Each SITE (blue dot at the top of the list) gets its own password, not each page (blue page icon on the list) within a site.

See: http://web.mac.com/tygress/iWeb/daisy for an example. Use "test" as the username and "123456" for the password.

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If you use the web-based .Mac and homepage area with your iDisk:

1 - Go to www.mac.com. Log in to your .Mac account there.
2 - Click "Homepage" at the top of the screen.
3 - On the lower right hand corner, click "Add another site."
4 - Enter a name for the site. You will have the option of creating a password. Hit "Create Site."
5 - You can then create pages for it. When you publish the page, it will have a password. See example at:

http://homepage.mac.com/tygress/schoolwork

(Use "testing" as the password.)

Hope this helps! If you ever have a question like this again, click the HELP menu (last menu on the right) from within the application you want to use and type in a search word - for this one, I did "password" from iWeb's help menu. It gave me the step-by-step instructions. It's a great resource and you don't have to wait for someone to answer you. :-)

Answer 2

Have you considered using Flickr instead? If all you use your .Mac account for is photocasts, a Flickr Pro account will prove much cheaper. The excellent FlickrExport plugin (http://connectedflow.com/flickrexport/) will let you upload photos into Flickr sets and you can assign access permissions in Flickr to restrict the photos to 'friends'. A drawback of this aproach, however, will be that your clients will be able to leave comments on the photos (or perhaps this is an advantage?)