| Saturday,
June 12, 1999 I have converted every one of the directory names for this
site into lower case only, and I'll use that convention henceforth. File names are a
different story. I have to rely on you to find and report broken links, and my thanks to
all of you who do this. If you report broken links, please tell me:
- The exact name of the page with the broken link.
- The exact name of the link handle (the visible text for the link).
- Where it points to now.
- If possible, where it ought to point.
That's a bit of work, of course, but you at least know what it is you've found. A
report that "a link to foozis is broken" doesn't, alas, do me a great deal of
good given the size of this place...
Now to try to get the Front Page Extensions working. First I'll try to publish this
place to the Pair.com site where all the extensions DO work, and see. The problem up to
now has been that you can't PUBLISH to that site, and if you use ftp to do it manually all
kinds of problems happen with the indexing. Front Page doesn't like ftp if its extensions
are running.
My advice to anyone creating a web would be to think a while before going with the
Borg. Once you start Front Page it's hard to go elsewhere. I sort of wish I had stayed
with Dreamweaver. On the other hand I am not sure Dreamweaver has the kind of robots and
document search features that Front Page would have if it worked properly.
ALSO: Front Page is seriously broken in one respect:
if, after painstakingly converting all the folder names to all lower case, you then create
a link with a folder name in it by following the link and clicking on it in FP Editor, you
will get AN UPPER CASE FOLDER NAME inserted into the code. This means that a UNIX Front
Page site will NOT BE ABLE TO find the folder. FP solves this on an NT site by not caring
about the case; and in fact a good argument can be made for that practice, but since NT
isn't capable of the server efficiency of UNIX systems, and UNIX DOES care, it's
unconscionable that Front Page makes deliberately broken links and inserts them. I was
horrified to see that after all my work, FP was putting in capital letters.
I would have been better off converting all my folder names to ALL UPPER CASE which is
the convention DOS and NT use to begin with; that would make FP's trick useless. I may yet
do that, to avoid the problems in future. But I am unhappy with Front Page.
But now I find a fix.
"I do all these silly things so you won't have to..."
I am reminded that you may not know about the REPORTS section of this site. There is a
"reports home page" that sort of describes
what is available there. It hasn't been revised in a while, but I'm getting to it, and
it's still got some good stuff in it.
If you were ever involved in the Science
Talent Search or NSF Fair, there is an
important letter over in MAIL.
This is a test. I find that mail, which has been lower case for some
time, is seen as 'mail' when I do links to that directory, but reports, which has been
lower case only since last night, becomes 'REPORTS'
when I link to that folder. I have since shut down Editor and reopened it. Let's see what
that does. Nope, it's still 'REPORTS'. I will now shut down the whole thing, FP
Editor and Explorer, and re-open.
<<DONE>>
Now let us link to reports again. And VOILA! it
links to 'reports' now. Even if the link word is REPORTS,
of course. So the moral of this story is that with Front Page, if you rename directories,
you must SHUT DOWN and REOPEN the Explorer before it knows about the renaming even though
it did the renaming itself. We can hope that this will not happen in FP 2000.
AND NOW I NEED ISDN ADVICE.
I have a new Ascend Pipeline Router, which I am told will allow me to use the ISDN line
to connect up my system to the ISDN phone. My ISDN phone is connected to the Telos Zephyr,
and I know you can turn the Zephyr off and back on and still get a connection through the
Telos.
One source familiar with ISDN says I cannot share the ISDN line: it must be either full
time Telos Zephyr or full time connected to the Ascend for data. I don't find that
reasonable but then I don't fully comprehend ISDN. I know they won't work both at the same
time (or at least I wouldn't expect them to) but surely I can play switchboard operator
and plug the Telos in the few times a week I need it, shutting down the Ascend connection
before I do that?
Or can I? Once again, I don't want speculation, I need expertise. I have
conflicting speculations already. I would very much like to connect up that Ascend
Pipeline WAN box and use it, but I must be able to use the Telos connection for the Views
of the Week broadcast, and I will probably be doing other radio interviews using it now
that I have it. That, then, is primary, but for speedy uploads and web site maintenance
I'd sure like to be able to use the Ascend box when, most of the time, I am not using the
Telos.
Advice wanted. And thanks. I suspect there are a dozen people here who know. I could
find out by experiment, but I would really not put the time into it if I am drawing dead.
(Drawing dead: an old poker term, meaning that there is no card left in the draw that you
could get that would win the pot...)
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
