by Eolake Stobblehouse

I should know better than writing an article in anger, but apparently I don't. And maybe an article on a Mac site will start some changes, stranger things have happened. (Not often, admittedly.)

Unlike with Photoshop, which have solid improvements with each version, I am thoroughly confused as to why I have paid Adobe good money now FOUR times for upgrades to Golive, when the application just get worse every time.

Maybe it doesn't, but I can't offhand point to anything I have gained, and I can point to fresh irritations with each version.

Golive is supposed to be the big, professional solution, yes? So how come it can barely run my big site? One of my other sites, my commercial site (DOMAI. Warning, nudity), which makes my living, is admittedly very big, over 30,000 files and one gigabyte, but there are bigger sites out there. What do they run the really big sites on, I wonder? Already Golive six was pretty slow and unstable with that site, and Golive "CS" (Golive 7) is worse, much worse. Even just when typing on a page, it is so slow that I can't use it for writing! And there is a half-second lag for every little thing I ask it to do. I just can't use it. (Well, I can, but it is painful.)

I should add that this slowness is not happening on an old and slow machine, it is on the G5 DP 2GHz!! (with two gigs of RAM.)

That is the bad part, I don't have a choice now about using it. It ate my site! (bleep-bleep-bleep...) I decided to open the backup site it had created for the older version. OK, it did that, even if it took two minutes. Then I had to rescan the folders for new items created in the few days I had used version 7. This took over five minutes!

Not only that, but before it was done chucking 15,000 files (what??), it crashed! Big surprise, Golive 6 was always the least stable program I had.

No problem, I will just open the file again. Oooooh no you don't. It was now corrupted. Well, fortunately it had created a backup file. Except that was corrupted too, and disappeared from the disk when I tried to use it.

So now I had no earlier version to use, I was locked into the slow Golive 7!

OK, one more possibility: I could create a new site file from scratch by copying the whole site (a gigabyte), and importing it. All my settings would be lost, but what could I do?

So I did it. It took a while. And when I had done it, I had a site. Almost... for all the graphics where missing. On ALL the pages! In other words, a completely useless web site.

So here is where I stand now. I have a version of my site on Golive 7 which is too slow to use. And I have a version on Golive 6 which is has no graphics anywhere. And just to make it clear again, this site is mission critical, it is my living.

Adobe, what are you going to do about this?

- Eolake Stobblehouse

PS: Letters I have received regarding this articles have told me:
1) that it is indeed a problem Golive CS has with large sites. Seems not to affect smaller ones. Adobe has no solution yet.
2) That what what people use for very large sites, especially ones with very fluid content, is something called "Content Management Systems" which run on the server itself. I am rather astounded I haven't heard about these things before. One reason might be that they seemingly only recently have become affordable for anybody who is not a very big corporation. I am not too keen on getting into such a thing, not until I have a good reason for it, and a webmaster.