| Tuesday,
July 6, 1999 Let me begin by pasting in my lead observation
from the first page, since that goes away and I want to keep this:
Princess is now running Front Page 2000 on Windows 2000 and it's
working. We had problems with the printer, but that turns out to be
due to old NT 4 drivers installed; getting rid of them was a pain;
but once they were gone and we reinstalled the HP 4000 with the
drivers that came with Windows 2000, everything worked fine.
Front Page 2000 badly needs a manual. There is now CUE's
Front Page 2000 Special Edition book which explains most of it
in detail: if you get Office 2000 prepare to buy about three $35
third party books before it will be very useful; in particular you
MUST have a third party manual on Front Page 2000. With that, FP
2000 is useful. Without it, you are doomed.
Today is column day and I'll be working on that most of the day.
A great deal has happened here, and this place is now organized
better than it ever has been before. Later...
AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH That / trick doesn't work. If you don't have
../../images/image for, say, view/view55.html to get to birdline then it
doesn't find it. AAARRRRGGGGHHH. More later, but it appears that the
trick doesn't work. For one magical moment there....
Alas, it's all true, I guess. /page/pagething.html does not in fact
take you to the top level. I have been through the HTML spec books, and I
have tried it here, and I cannot find a simple way to tell the thing to
"ignore how deep you are in layers, and go up to the top, and start
looking there." I find that the links are still broken, and I
have to go ../../ etc. If that's wrong I must be doing something wrong,
but I sure can't figure it out, and the HTML manuals are no help on this
so far as I can see. Sigh.
Another MAJOR annoyance of FP 2000 that has no fix I can find in the
book is HOW TO PRESERVE FORMATTING WHEN PASTING FROM WORD DOCUMENTS. There
is a "paste special" command in "edit" but that does
nothing interesting. In every case it kills the font information on the
way. FP 98 didn't do that. This is sheer stupidity, and costs me precious
time.
==
If anyone knows a way to buy a professional copy or to download the
evaluation copy of Allaire's homesite editor, please tell me. I can't get past their
endorsements and lauds to buy a copy. When I try to buy it I get can't
display errors.
Calling the Allaire company long distance gets you one person, the
young lady who answers the telephone, and then only if you press the O
button after calling the 671 number; the toll free number doesn't offer
that option. There is no human being in press relations or in sales, and
the purchase tree offers upgrades not the original product; it also
transfers you to a fulfillment company that puts you on hold.
I conclude that it is impossible to buy allair's homesite editor unless
you have lots of patience and are prepared to spend hours at trying. If it
were available in book stores or at Fry's I would try to buy it, but
deadlines are approaching. And my printer isn't working again.
Bloody hell.
LATER: OK: the marketing manager of Allaire has
made contact. I have managed to download and install the Homesite editor,
and Allaire is sending me a disk copy. I haven't tried it yet but I will;
it comes with impressive testimonials. Their web site was experiencing
horrible problems today, and it's not organized as well as they think it
is. Still, all is well that ends well.
The Spam issue and one approach are over in
mail. The only problem is that currentmail isn't the currentmail any
more. Earthlink glitched while I was trying to upload to the site, and now
that site believes that currentmail is a dead file and busy to boot.
THIS STATEMENT IS NO LONGER OPERATIONAL! For the moment USE mail/ccurrentmail.html
until someone can physically get to the site, shut down the server, and
restart it. We have an undeletable file that denies access to everyone,
and there is nothing that can be done about it. I am beginning to hate
small computers. This wasn't my idea. I was supposed to be writing a
column. Of course everything goes wrong at once, and Earthlink decided
that today was a good day to die.
I have accounts on other services, and I think I am going to have to
set up another way to access the net when Earthlink decides to get dirty,
which it does more often than it should.
==
OK: we're set. Currentmail is fixed. The printer is fixed. Earthlink
has started behaving (and it was very hot here today). It is evening, it
is time to do the column, I have a happy ending and a moral to all my
stories; in general all is well, and it's time to get to work. Thanks for
putting up with all this nonsense. Now to write the column and get it all
documented. Things do work. Sometimes.
I have put the end of the Allaire story up with
the beginning of it. Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to tell me
other ways to get the editor. Clearly Homesite has a number of intelligent
and loyal supporters, which is always a good sign.
The best place to find it and almost any other product that has a demo
or shareware version to download is www.tucows.com
which I expect you all know, but I thought I'd get that in the record.
And I am hard at work on the column which is going to have a LOT in it
this month. Several readers have
asked what happened to the auto-reply I used to have. That got
clobbered with Outlook 2000, but it wasn't Outlook's fault, and I simply
haven't set it up again yet. I will, Real Soon Now, and my apologies.
I am embarrassed to say, though, that I do not know
HOW to create the reply messages. I did it once, but I can't find any
reference in any book on OUTLOOK on HOW TO MAKE AN AUTOMATIC REPLY MESSGE.
The Rules Wizard wants a file of type oft, and type oft isn't in the
index, the silly help assistant says he doesn't know what that is, and in
general nothing I do seems to help find it.
If anyone knows how to create automatic reply files for Outlook 2000 (I
am sure it is the same as for Outlook 98) PLEASE TELL ME. This is
mortifying. The help files in Outlook 2000 are HORRIBLE, and there is no
index in the usual sense. There is only the stupid office assistant who is
terminally stupid. This is really annoying.
WOW THAT WAS QUICK. Thanks to Roland Dobbins. See below on how to do
it.
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