A FrontPage Tutorial for Tripod Members |
You may or may not be new to Tripod or FrontPage, but if you plan to use the FrontPage product for any length of time, you'll eventually run into problems on Tripod. If you do as I did, and go off on an extensive research effort, you'll just find that the problems you encounter are primarily due; to the quarks of how FrontPage manages their web folders, and the lack of support and knowledge that Tripod, Microsoft, and the Web Community have about the FrontPage package and Tripod's sever configuration. You'll even wonder if there's anyone alive, with any thread of knowledge on how to resolve your FrontPage issues. Well I'll attempt to help a little. I'm hoping that this Tutorial will get you stated the right way towards using FrontPage on Tripod, and give you some ideas on resolving a few very frustrating issues. The only one note of caution here is that these instructions are written using FrontPage 2000, and may be different for other versions.
The first thing you must do is create the FrontPage folders, necessary for file transfer using the FrontPage 'Publish Web' feature on Tripod. If you go to the Tripod.com site and log in, you should see a link on the 'MY ACCOUNT' drop down menu for web details. This should take you to a page that show your disk usage and band width, with links for upgrading these. You'll also find on this page a link to enable FrontPage. This may be near the bottom, try using your web browser's 'Find on this Page' feature. You'll need to enable using this link. So if you haven't done so already...
Next I recommend that you take a look at the your directory to see if the files were created properly. To do this you must use the Tripod directory interface. This is because on Tripod you'll have no Telnet or FTP access these hidden files. You can reach the interface by returning to the Tripod site and on the 'BUILD & EDIT' drop down menu there should be a link to the File Manager. Then once you're at this page, look for the following folders; _vti_bin, _vti_cnf, _vti_pvt, and _vti_txt.
Now it's time to try a simple 'Publish Web' function from FrontPage. First to avoid confusion, create a new web in the 'File' drop down for this test using the 'One Page Web' template icon. This should have a _private and an images folder as well as an index.htm page. First of all the index.htm will not show on Tripod unless the extension is changed to html. The best way to this is to open the page, type something like "Hello" and save as index.html. Now you can either delete the original htm page or not as this is only a test. This reason for this is when you use your http://[member_name].tripod.com/ url you must have this index.html page or you'll be sent to a tripod page telling the page could not be found. [member_name] is the one that you use to log into tripod.
Before you do anything else, you read the "About publishing" tutorial of FrontPage. You must put in your tripod url, with a slash at the end (http://frontpage.tripod.com/[member_name]/), in the first field of the 'Publish Web' popup window. Use the 'Publish all pages, overwriting any already on destination', and then click 'Publish'
Note: Should you see the following:
404 Not Found
Not Found The requested URL /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc was not found on this server.
This seems to be a common error cause by a configuration file called '_vti_inf', and which should not ever be changed. This has always worked for me in this instance, so try selecting the 'Include subwebs' and 'Secure connection required (SSL)' and click on 'Publish'. This normally pops up a warning that tells you that FrontPage can not find a server on port 443. This is what we want, so click ok. Now try the above step again and you should get a log in prompt. When you get logged in, the files should transfer fine. It has always worked form me with such a basic setup, and I have been so very frustrated about the lack of support on such a basic issue.
There is one more thing, I would like to mention here. I was able to use FrontPage for quite some time in this manner, then one day I made a very complex page using forms and likes supplied from other sites such as good, and suddenly I no longer could fix the problem in this manner. The only thing I felt I could do is FTP by other means, rather than fiddle with the configuration files and totally get hosed. I therefore, got a copy of CuteFtp, and carried on. I found that most of the _vti_files were really not necessary to have the site function properly.
TIP: Here is something to try. Make a directory just out side of your FrontPage directory try moving the defective files over to this directory to be FTP with a different program, then try publishing from FrontPage again. Once you have got things going properly you only need to up date the changed pages. Then if things go a rye, you can always FTP the original back to see what changes may have screwed things up. Don't forget there's always a current date/time stamp when files are updated.
TIP: Did you know that you can create another web, just as we did in this tutorial, open it with FrontPage, to have it open a new window? And did you also know that with this new window you can drag and drop the files you want to the new web? Just try a test, and create a new web to see. (If you're having a problem with this, I usually drag the item down to the task bar, select the window there, and when it pops forward, I drag to a file name on the 'Folder List'. Wa-la! Just like dragging and dropping from one regular folder to the next on the desk top.)
Remember you can also try ftp://ftp.tripod.com in a browser window, (or click on the link here), to transfer manually. Careful about using illegal file names when you transfer .
Now that the transfer has been completed, try opening the web site with your http://[member_name].tripod.com/ url. If it doesn't work, try first to check the index.html with the Tripod file manager. This is as much as I know, and I've been using Tripod, and FrontPage for almost four years now. If there was any type of adage that applies about using these two products together, it's "Live and Learn".
So, I hope that I was of some help to you.
For further information regarding the follow error message:
404 Not Found
Not Found The requested URL /_vti_bin/shtml.exe/_vti_rpc was not found on this
server.
Try reading the following Microsoft Support pages to understand why:
How to Configure FrontPage with No Root Web
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;828909&Product=fp2003
From the Tripod Help Site:
How do I publish my FrontPage site to Tripod?
On using CGI:
Tripod - CGI Support Field Guide
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