WinXP help! I killed my website…

Marie,

I can’t say I totally follow what you’ve done, but regardless of where you build your website, if all links are relative rather than absolute, you shouldn’t have any problems uploading it and finding all is well on the web. I’m wondering if some of your links might have inadvertently been absolute, with references to explicit paths on your hard drive. If so, then certainly that would cause problems on the web. I’ve seen the same happen to a few files of mine, never certain just exactly what I did to cause the problem. Nonetheless, the fix was as easy as correcting the path in the link so that it begins at the root level of the web or, if nested more deeply, it begins at the directory level where the web page is found.

Example: The page "my_album.htm" within the "images" directory links to the file "gallery.htm". The bad link might be referencing an explicit hard drive location such as…

file://C:/Documents%20and%20%Settings/Marie/Desktop/WebFolde r/images/gallery.htm

….when it should be using either of the following links:

Good link 1 = ../images/gallery.htm relative to web root or Good link 2 = gallery.htm relative to current directory

Hope that helps,

Daryl

Daryl, I guess all my links are absolute. That’s what I learned to do and for 4 years all went well. I haven’t the vaguest idea how to change them.

I got some emails this morning that some people can see the opening page. Why do I see only a "cannot display" page?

I had a thought last night. After the uploads were done, I saw that in one of the categories on FTP called "webimages", there was another folder inside it called "website" (which is everything). That floored me. It’s not supposed to be there and is not that way in my organization at all, so I removed it.

Now, I’m wondering if that was where the new uploads were going to and I should have removed everything else! Does that sound reasonable?

I’m thinking of re-uploading all over again, only this time, I’ll open only one section at a time instead of letting the whole batch go up at once.

Marie,

If others could see your opening page, but not you, then you may have been experiencing problems that I’m guessing were related to the PC virus that has been going around. I had the same problem accessing my website and others, and similarly saw problems at work. The errors I saw were about being unable to resolve the DNS address, so maybe they were a little different. In any case, with no action on my part, everything is back to normal now. I’m guessing various ISPs may have been getting flooded with virus-infected e-mail and were taking corrective actions that temporarily resulted in their DNS servers being unavailable.

Getting back to your question…If "website" was nested inside "webimages", that does sound like another problem in and of itself. My thought is that yes, a re-upload may well be the thing to do, ensuring that the upload path is correct.

Absolute links work fine so long as you don’t ever move your website to a new domain. But, if you are, for example using links such as <http://www.marie.com/website/images/gallery.htm> in your HTML code, then you would have to update all such links if you ever moved the site to <http://www.marie_maier.com>. In discussing "absolute" versus "relative", I may not even have the correct terminology, but I thought that is what they are called. Not being familiar with NoteTab Pro, I don’t know how it creates links. I’d think regardless of how you insert a link with that tool, it could still make them relative or abosolute, depending upon how it was designed to operate.

Aabosolute link as I understand it would explictly define the full path to your website and any subdirectories as it locates a file. Relative links are paths relative to where "calling file" (the file invoking the link) exists. If the "calling file" is at the web root, all paths within the web are lateral (at the same level) or downward (to subdirectories). If the "calling file" is more deeply nested in the web and points to another file outside of the same directory, then the link is defined relative to the web root using that "..\<folder>" convention of my example earlier.

All my advice comes from someone who is just a hobbyist, not a professional website designer, so there may be good reaons for using absolute references if you’ve been taught that way. I just can’t think of any. If your website if very large, I’d not worry with changing the links if all has been working up until now. Not unless you’ve got a tool that facilitates the process. I’ve always used Front Page (now using the 2003 version) and it is easy to use for global changes to links and general site management tasks. I suspect GoLive and DreamWeaver are similarly powerful, as they are more often used by web design professionals.

Regards,

Daryl

I’m at a real loss,and thanks Daryl.

It looks like a new upload is necessary. I discovered that if I added /index.html to the URL, I CAN see the opening page, and I can see all other pages! However, other people apparently can’t. I was told the links on the opening page do not work, I fixed them in the the text editor and re-uploaded, checked the page on the web and the page is still without the corrected links. So, upload must have gone elsewhere.

I didn’t know that I’d have to change links if I moved to a different ISP. I’ll dread having to do that, I’m sure….

I’ll re-upload this afternoon and see what happens then…… thanks for your input……..MM

Marie,

I don’t know if I can be of much more help or not, but would you mind sharing the website link with me? I could at least give it a quick look during my lunch break. I don’t fully understand the need to add the "/index.html" to the URL, but maybe that depends upon the browser in use, if a rather old one. To my knowledge, all current browsers automatically recognize "index.htm" and "index.html" as your default page to load, whether for the web root or any subdirectory. I use "index.htm" in most all of my subdirectories so that I can specify the URL down to the directory name only, thus simplifying the URL. I’ve never seen a problem.

Again, not knowing exactly how your links are specified, it may be that NoteTaker Pro actually used relative links and you may be OK. But, if any of your links begin with an "http://", then you’ve got an absolute link (at least by my defintion of one) that would require changing if you switch ISPs and are using your current ISP to host your site.

Just for whatever it’s worth, if you are doing all this also as a hobby but would like to have more web space than you might have through and ISP, I use a hosting service called "nomonthlyfees.com". Their price is $200 for "life", with an annual maintenance and domain registration fee of $70 currently. They provide 600MB of web space and quite a wealth of options. How they measure up to other more expensive companies, I don’t know, but I do know they keep their costs down by using 3rd party providers for some features. They’ve always been pretty fast to act on any of the few problems I’ve reported, and I’ve been very happy with them overall. I know 2 or 3 others who I’ve referred to them that also have been satisfied. One drawback that may not appy to other hosting companies, is that nomonthlyfees.com does not back up your website files. So, you have to maintain current files on your PC or elsewhere. I do that anyway, so it’s not too big a deal. Such a service may be more than you’d need or want, but I figured it was worth a mention.

Daryl

all current browsers automatically recognize "index.htm" and "index.html" as your default page to load

actually that’s a web server setting. you can set it to whatever page you want recognized as the default page when a user enters without typing an actual page name… or none (in which case you should get either an ftp like directory listing or an access denied message, also a web server setting).

some common names for main site pages are index.html, index.htm, default.htm and default.html

Dave is correct, but in practise most webmasters will have both index.htm and index.html in the list of default pages. So Daryl is pretty close to being right too.

Dave and Don,

Thanks to both of you for clarifying the default page. I know here at work "welcome.htm" is used for our intranet webs, and I’d forgotten about that at the time of my earlier comment. So, that does point to something other than the browser establishing what the default main page is.

Daryl

A happy update! The problem turned out to be the errant folder that appeared inside another folder where it was not supposed to be. Thinking that I should completely remove it, I did. Nothing still worked, and people were only seeing 1 page with links not working.

So, I spent the whole afternoon on FTP files and lo and behold, there were hundreds of them out of place. I removed all that didn’t belong, spent a few more hours re-uploading from the partition I wanted them to be in, and VIOLA!! All was well–except for the non-support of the applets.

That was taken care of today, and I am one very happy lady–still, far from thrilled with XP, but learning to tolerate it. Someone also showed me the radio button to set in IE which places new info on at every time, instead of the cache I may have been seeing….

Thanks for comments given—-I’m learning more and more. Thanks for explaining the differences between absolute and relative links too. On my pages both are used. The pages connecting to each other I now know are "relative",(thank you Daryl). Those connecting to other sites are absolute.

I’d love to tell you about Directoris.com, my ISP. It’s $85 for life, includes 250 MB of web space, 5 GB of monthly transfer, 10 MySql databases, etc… no banner ads. They are GREAT people who really care about their customers and I recommend them wholeheartedly.

I’m just so happy to be "websiteworking" again! Thanks all! MM