The eternal struggle of ASP against Frontpage

Kieran.Block — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 00:56:00 GMT

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

Just when you thought it was over...

Kieran.Block — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:27:00 GMT

Right, so I got my blog up and running on my SBS machine, fighting tooth and nail to get it to happen, and then made the fatal mistake of telling people about it...

It then became blatantly obvious that my link was by no means up to hosting any kind of website, and was inflicting horrendous load times of up to 20 seconds!

So, it was time for a little bit of outsourcing. With zero research into the matter, I decided that GoDaddy was the place to be - I have dealt with them before, and knew that they were reasonably (if not fantastically) priced.

$10 per month later, I have 100GB of space at my disposal, and load times that are very reasonable (well inside the 4 second window).

My lack of research then decided to kick me in the face, when I found out that installing CommunityServer onto GoDaddy was akin to licking a watermelon into shape.

Fortunately, this guide was absolutely perfect, and worked with only one slight hiccup. You cannot have Frontpage Extensions AND CommunityServer running on the same hosting plan (GoDaddy uncooly force all sites and subsites in the same plan to use the same settings).

The only other thing to note, if you want to blog to be at the root of the site, the previous DLL that I used (below) will not work with GoDaddy. You will need to use this

So, blog works, company website doesn't (search, contact and TOC). That is fine though, I am content with rebuilding them in ASP or leaving them out entirely - it just adds to the snowballing project that is my website!

Kieran

K Blog : GoDaddy

The eternal struggle of ASP against Frontpage

Just when you thought it was over...