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ABC ~ All
'Bout Computers FrontPage Shortcuts
That Make the Job Easy Recently I've been making a lot of changes on my website and thought I'd share with you some of the FrontPage features I've used to make the job easier. Include Pages Tina Clarke wrote a good article on FrontPage Includes in a previous issue of ABC and she's been urging me to try them for a long time ... but I didn't want to take the time to change all of my pages since everything *seemed* to be working OK. Well, when I decided to redo all of ABC and, later, all of my website, I figured it was time to try using this "Included Content" FrontPage Component to see what all the hoopla was about. And, I can tell you, I am VERY impressed. What are "Includes" and why would you want to use them? Basically, think of any text that you include on all or many of your pages. A good example would be the bylines at the end of everyone's articles in ABC. In the past when one of the writers would write to me and tell me they had a new website or service and wanted me to update the byline at the end of their articles, I would have to manually change this on every one of their pages. In the case of Tina or Vic Ferri who have written over thirty articles for me, this was a big job. So, when I redid ABC, I made include pages for all of the authors' bylines. The way this works, in a nutshell, is I make one html page for each author's byline, then I simply "include" that at the end of all of their articles. Now, when they tell me they want something added or changed, I only have to change it once, on the include page and all of their articles are automatically updated. What a time saver! For more info on how to do this, read Tina's article. Find and Replace Another problem I wanted to tackle for a long time was all the spam I was receiving because my email link is all over my website and the spam robots were harvesting it like crazy. Again, the thought of what this entailed led me to procrastinate. It seemed like there were just too many "mailtos" to replace. Well, once again, it was one of Tina's articles that motivated me. In the last issue, she made a lot of good suggestions for ways to *hide* email addresses from the bloodsuckers. I decided the suggestion she made about enclosing the @ within <code></code> seemed like the one for me, so I figured I'd try FP's Find/Replace in my code and it let me clean this up in my ENTIRE website in a matter of minutes. I couldn't believe how easy it actually was. All I had to do was tell FrontPage to check my whole web for the mailto link and replace it with the new code format. An example would be: FIND REPLACE WITH Now, my email address is still available to people, but
they will have to copy it and paste it into an email instead of just
clicking on it. But the spam bots can no longer harvest it from my
site! In fact, it was so easy that I decided to do the same for
all my writers. I figured I owed it to them to protect them from
the spammers too. So, an email address on my site that used to look
like joeblow@website.com now
looks like joeblow Contact Forms Instead of Email Another problem I was having was my own spam filters were occasionally catching mail sent to me that was not spam. Though I tried my best to check all the mail caught by my filters, occasionally one would slip thru. Then I would get an angry email from someone that I did not reply to. So, I decided an online Form would be a better alternative. But, forms also include "mailtos" so I followed Mike Baynes' advice and made myself a throwaway email address at yahoo and setup the form to use this address. Now, if that address starts to collect too much spam, I can simply delete it from yahoo and make a new one. Then, it's just one step to switch to the new address on the form. When I create forms with FP, the email is sent to me from me, so there's no chance my spam filters will grab it. If you don't know how to create contact forms for your FP website, read the tutorial I wrote for TechTrax. FrontLook's Site Search Engine The next thing I had to address was the inefficiency of the Search feature I had on my site. Up til now I've always used atomz's free search feature on my site and it was fairly adequate. However, it only allowed me to include 500 pages and ABC alone is over 500 pages, so I had to have separate search pages for different parts of my site, which was getting pretty confusing and many people were searching and not finding what they were looking for. FrontLook had approached me in the past to beta test their Site Search Engine and I had reported back to them that I thought it was nice, but since my site includes quite a few subsites and my host doesn't allow me to use .asp pages, I really couldn't use it. Well, to my surprise, FrontLook replied that they were looking into that and soon they reported to me that they had improved the beta to include subsites and also had a version that uses php instead of asp, which my host does accept, so I decided to give it a try. AND WOW!! I am sooo happy with my new search engine. Easy to use and works really well. Read my full review of this inexpensive FrontPage Addin here. Cleaning Up Code from Word Documents One last shortcut I found (thanks to Jonathan L in the FPList). I'm sure many of you have seen the ridiculous amount of bloated code you get added to your web pages if you simply copy/paste Word docs. Most of the writers for ABC send me Word documents and it takes me FOREVER to clean up the excess code, so I tried Jonathan's much more efficient way. Here's a sample of what I get when I copy a few lines from Word and paste it into FP:
However, with Jonathan's advice, I tried a new method. Just create a new blank page in FP and go to FP's Insert menu and choose "File", then browse to find the Word doc and insert it. Here's the code I got when I did it that way:
You can see how much easier it is to format the second one and make it conform to your webpage style (basically all that's missing is a couple bullets to be added to replace those <dir> tags), without all that bloated yucky stuff. What a great time saver THIS is....thank you, Jonathan! (Others have always advised that I should copy the text from Word to Notepad, then copy from there to FP...or copy from Word to FP and use Paste Special, Unformatted text...but both of those methods removed ALL formatting and required a lot more work to make them look presentable...this way is MUCH better.) There are lots more timesavers in FP and eventually I will learn them all. My next venture is learning how to use CSS to setup default fonts, background colors, and other formatting choices. So, once I've mastered that, I'll let you know! Linda Johnson is a college instructor of all of the Microsoft Office Programs, as well as Adobe PhotoShop and Windows. She also teaches online distance learning classes in Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Word at Eclectic Academy. She has worked helpdesk and teaches and lectures at many local businesses and tech schools in her area. Support this newsletter by checking out Linda's eBooks, MS Word MAGIC!, Book I: Fonts, Fun & Formats and Book II: Table Wizardry, How To Get Started As a Software Trainer, and her newest series of MSOffice eBook Tutorials and CD |
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