The eternal struggle of ASP against Frontpage
I have been an unwilling participant in this battle through my own laziness. I didn't want to code my site from scratch, so leaving it in frontpage was the easiest thing to do. Until now. In an effort to have a blog and website that can actually live together in harmony, I decided to kick the hell out of my website.
It was a hard decision, but ultimately the right one. Frontpage does some horrible things to web pages, not as bad as Word, but still, pretty bad.
The real problem was that I built the site in frontpage, using a theme. This in an of itself is not so much of a problem, the issue is that Frontpage extensions and ASP2.0 cannot live together on the one godaddy server.
I can't update the frontpage website (and have it live) without frontpage extensions on, and when they are on, my blog is down. The catalyst for this was a recent format/reinstall of my main PC, as well as a new laptop, and logging into my blog to cover some horrible problems, only to find that my blog does not exist. Sigh.
So, how did I defrontpage my site? Relatively simply.
I am by no means a coder. I can read HTML, and regularly kick it until it works, but I haven't got a creative bone in my body - I am an engineer, not an artist.
The things I was worried about were the menus. I cracked open the index.htm file and started ripping out all the frontpage related garbage.
The first thing to break was the left menu and the rollovers, the theme that I was using autogenerated images for the menu - this is clearly not going to work anymore, but I doubt I will be adding much to it anyway. Fixing this was as simple as copying the topbuttons (which were part of the theme) over the sidemenu. I decided to rename all the images to make it easier while I was at it.
So, now I had the mind numbing task of going through all the pages and updating the data so that it points a the new files, with the new rollovers. I uploaded the site, it all worked and looked surprisingly good - it fails w3 validation, but not on anything too bad. I also updated the helpsite, but have not yet uploaded it.
As soon as I got the site up, I made sure frontpage server extensions were uninstalled, resetup ASP2.0 and click on my blog link. Nothing. Fantastic, so I severly retard myself by hours of HTML coding, and my blog still doesn't work. I scoured through my install notes from when I initially installed community server, only to find that all the godaddy options have changed because there was an update 3 days ago...
So, I rip it apart, setup my permission, setup my ASP directories again and wait for the update. I can't test it internally because CS resolves www.block.net.au/cs to block.net.au/cs - as block.net.au is my internal domain name, I obviously can't go split DNS'ing that. So, I abuse my admin powers and login to a client site to test it - down. I search for any other insight I might have left myself by googling my name (knowing that I am both the first hit of my name, and that I had full install details of what I did the first time).
In a string of what can only be described as endless, influenza induced boobery, I discover that my blog has been taken off Google. Kinda serves me right for not noticing it was down for so long I suppose...
So, the #1 Kieran Block is now my hero, a young lad from Canada who plays hockey, and punches the absolute crap out of people week in week out. A heart warming moment, but not a whole lot of help for me.
After clicking every link in Godaddy's control panel hopefully trying to find the "uber-secret-makeitwork-page", I stumble across the DNS section, which is throwing an error because block.net.au is not resolving to godaddy, but rather somewhere else.
A whole lot of swearing and a hosts file hack on the remote terminal server, and here I am. And now, slightly satisfied and disappointed with myself all at once, I am off to bed.
Kieran