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Tina's FrontPage News
~~Tina
Clarke, AccessFP - Frontpage Resource Centre
Site
Cleanup
Dust
out those cobwebs with a weekly sweep.
Doing site cleaning IS a chore, however it WILL save you valuable time,
provide more mbs for your buck, and in doing it every week will make you
rest easy your web is as shipshape and pristine as can be.
So what can you do?
What are the benefits of having a clean well-maintained site?
Would you want your visitors to find your old files? Last year's prices?
How embarrassing. Keep your customers from coming across old outdated or
just simply incorrect information.
The web site is much easier to work with when you don’t have unnecessary
files that get in the way and it’s much easier to find a file in, say, a
group of 20 than 40 files.
Finally, FrontPage works much more smoothly and quickly when there are
fewer files on the site. This is because FrontPage works by loading a
‘list’ of all the files in the web site when you first open it.
NOTE:
Before you start on your spring clean, you should note that deleting a
file through FrontPage is the end of the file and you won’t find it
sitting in your recycle bin later. This is a NON-REVERSIBLE step. So it is
important you are sure you want to delete files. If you think you may need
them later the simple
thing to do is either keep back ups of the files or just publish the whole
unchanged web as a back up copy on your hard drive.
FrontPage 2000:
File | Save As and browse to a back up web for individual files.
FrontPage 98:
In
the FrontPage explorer, select the file to be copied. Go to File | Export.
In the save as box, browse to a location on your hard drive that is
convenient for you and then click the Save button.
NOTE:
You should do the following before starting your maintenance schedule.
If your web contains files located in hidden folders, those files will not
be seen by you. To rectify this Go to Tools | Web Settings | click the
Advanced tab, and then select the ‘Show documents in hidden
directories’ check box. Press Ok.
Recalculate Hyperlinks:
Have you done this before? You should do this before EVERY publish, this
is because your Search and TOC (Table of Contents) will not reflect your
recent changes and will still point to old deleted files. Recalculating
also updates other data in FrontPage, such as deleting unused themes and
it updates the hyperlink display (as the name suggests), which is
essential when working in a multi-author environment.
To help you remember to recalculate hyperlinks you can configure FrontPage
to remind you. Go to Tools | Options | General and tick ‘Warn when
included components are out of date’ and ‘Warn when text index is out
of date’ press ok. When you next open your web if you have made changes to hyperlinks or
added files FrontPage should warn you.
FrontPage automatically tracks and repairs any internal hyperlinks in your
web whenever you move, rename, or delete a file, but what about external
links?
NOTE: Before verifying hyperlinks, you should save all open pages.
A broken hyperlink is one that has an invalid destination URL and will
return an error if the site visitor clicks the hyperlink.
A hyperlink might have an invalid URL for various reasons; you might have
mistyped it, or, if the destination page is on another World Wide Web
site, the page might have been changed or removed. Sometimes FrontPage
thinks the URL is invalid when it is not, this might be because the URL is
part of a JavaScript or has a redirect on it.
In Reports View click Broken Hyperlinks then Verify Hyperlinks on the
Reporting toolbar. Before you do this it is best to click the 'In Page'
column to group the broken links into their specific pages this way you
can work on the same page til
you're finished.
Double-click a hyperlink with broken status. To display the page to edit
it, click Edit Page. If you know the correct URL of the destination, edit
it in the Replace hyperlink with box. Or, click Browse to browse to the
page or file in a web, file system, or World Wide Web. To repair other
occurrences of this hyperlink in all pages in the current web, click
‘Change in all pages’. To repair other occurrences of this hyperlink
in selected pages, click ‘Change in selected pages’, and then
select the pages. Click Replace. If the destination is valid, the
hyperlink is no longer displayed in the Broken Hyperlinks report.
To find out how to print a list of the broken hyperlinks in FrontPage 2000
see my
article in Volume 2 of this newsletter.
For FrontPage 98 this works in the same way only the ‘Link To’ column
does not contain 'clickable links'.
For FrontPage 2002 you can now copy the reports. Read this.
I suggest you right click on the file when saved in folder view and click
don’t publish so the file won’t add to your server space.
NOTE:
In a Web site based on SharePoint Team Services from Microsoft, hyperlinks
in document libraries and interactive lists are created and managed
automatically.
The _private folder Sweep
The _private folder is the place where your forms (if you have any) will
by default store the results of entries submitted. No one can see your
_private folder but you, (they would need your id and password) so
anything in here that you don’t want can be deleted. If you still want
to keep it but don’t wish it on
the server you can simply right click the file in folder view choose
properties and the work group tab, then select ‘Exclude this file when
publishing the rest of the web’ and press OK.
NOTE:
Files used with any FrontPage forms will of course be recreated as users
submit the form, but you can copy the contents for storage elsewhere and
delete them. You should look for plain text files (.txt). HTML files (.htm)
are either part of the website statistics or results from your forms.
Double click to
identify the contents and do the same as for text files.
Orphaned Files
View | Reports | Unlinked files that is, files that can't be reached by
following hyperlinks from your home page. (In other words it does not
appear in the Navigation View). Orphaned pages may be outdated or
unneeded files that can
be deleted to clean up your web. They may also be pages that should be
added to the web's navigation structure in Navigation view, or linked to
by a hyperlink.
In FrontPage 2000 utilizing the Hyperlinks View will give you a better
idea of whether a file is in use or not. – See Graphic Orphans below.
TIP:
In the Unlinked Files report, you can double-click a file to open and edit
it.
In the Unlinked Files report, to add a task to a file reminding someone to
create a hyperlink to it, right-click the file, and then click Add Task on
the shortcut menu.
In FrontPage 98 the FrontPage 98 Explorer ‘All Files’ view also
features a way to easily arrange and sort "orphans".
Click on the ’All Files’ view and wait for the list to appear. Click
on the column heading named ‘Orphan’. This will sort the list to
‘Yes’ and ‘No’. The ‘Yes’ files are what FrontPage thinks you
are NOT using in the web site.
Graphic Orphans:
Hyperlinks view presents a visual "map" of the hyperlinks to and
from any page in your web. On the Views bar, click the Hyperlinks icon to
switch to Hyperlinks view, and then in the Folder List, click the file you
want. (To switch on Folder List go to View | and click the Folder List
icon).
TIP:
You can customize Hyperlinks view to show or hide page titles, links to
and from pictures, and so on.
Click once on the file to select the file. Then look at the ‘Hyperlinks
view’. The file will be the large icon in the middle. Are there
any blue arrows coming from the left pointing to the file? If yes, then
the file is being used by another file and
should not be deleted quite yet. If there is no arrow pointing in, then
there are no hyperlinks to the file. Again you can either do a Save As to
back them up or just delete them. The
first time I realized I could check my graphics in this way I gained 2mbs,
so it is well worth doing.
NOTE:
Is the graphic (jpg or gif) a part of a JavaScript? If so do not delete it
as FrontPage does not understand JavaScript in this instance and cannot
detect hyperlinks in JavaScript in your web so you need to make an
informed choice
with the help of FrontPage. One hopes that you don’t have that many
JavaScript graphics that you can’t remember them all!
Deleting a File:
Deleting a file in FrontPage works just like in Windows. Select the file
and use the delete key on the keyboard. Or you can right click a file and
select delete from the pop up menu. Don’t forget before you delete the
file, you may want to make a copy on your computer in case you need the
file later.
Spell check:
There are three ways you can check your spellings. You can check the
spelling on all pages, on selected pages, or as you go along.
FrontPage checks spelling only for text elements that can be edited in
Page view on the Normal tab. For example, if you add a component such as a
hover button, or if you specify a page title in the page properties, or
write alt tags, spelling in these elements will not be checked.
This is a chore we all wish to escape but it’s best done as you make
your pages. You can have Microsoft FrontPage automatically check your
spelling as you type. Misspelled words are underlined with a red wavy
line. You can also hide spelling errors (the red wavy lines are not
displayed). For example, hide the spelling errors until you are finished
editing the page, and then display them when you are ready to correct
them. Go to Tools | Page
Options | General tab, select ‘Check spelling as you type’ press ok.
If you don't want misspelled words to be underlined, select the Hide
spelling errors in all documents’ check box. To show spelling errors,
clear this check box.
Checking as you go along really is the best method. This way you
don’t have the chore waiting for you and you don’t forget to do it
before publishing and show your mistakes to the world
Using another two methods when FrontPage finds misspelled words, you can
correct them in two ways:
Add
a task for each page on which FrontPage finds misspelled words. You
can correct the spelling at any time by switching to Tasks view and
completing each task.
Correct spelling immediately after FrontPage has finished checking the
spelling. FrontPage displays a list of pages with misspelled words,
and you can then edit each page.
To implement spell check on selected pages or the entire web switch to
‘Folders view’. Click Tools | Spelling.
Do one of the following:
To check spelling in all pages in the current web, click Entire web.
To check spelling in pages you have selected, click Selected pages.
If you want FrontPage to add a task for each page with misspelled words,
select the Add a task for each page with misspellings box. Click Start.
To find out about FrontPage 2002 and all the usage files that
help you maintain your site check out this
article.
You should also look at
About
Web Site Management in FrontPage 2002
Specify
Usage Analysis Settings in FrontPage 2002
AutoFiltering
Web Site Reports in FrontPage 2002
There is more you can do to maintain your web environment but for now
I’ll hand you the brush!
Tina Clarke - Microsoft MVP - FrontPage, is
the Webmaster of AccessFP - FrontPage Resource Centre
http://accessfp.net/
and http://addonfp.com
She is also an editor of AnyFrontPageBytes Ezine. Subscribe to the ezine
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AnyFrontPageBytes and
get FREE FrontPage E-Books upon joining. And don't forget to subscribe to get
Weekly FrontPage Tips. Tina is also an artist and the owner of
http://clarke-abstract-art.com
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