Sitebuilder Resources : How-To's

Creating an RSS Feed on your FrontPage Web Site

dave — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 15:55:00 GMT

Recently I saw a question asking how to create an RSS Feed on a FrontPage web site so I thought it might be useful to post the response I gave here.

Most of the blogs are using ASP.NET. If that's what you're doing there's an article at http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/021804-1.aspx that gives you the code for how to do this on your site.

If you aren't using ASP.NET check out this article:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/odc_fp2003_ta/html/odc_fpbldgxmlwebs.asp

or this article .....

http://blogs.msdn.com/lisawoll/archive/2004/11/19/266972.aspx

and these sites ........

http://www.webreference.com/xml/column13/
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2002/12/18/dive-into-xml.html
http://www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/

How do you create content that is usable on a cell phone?

dave — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 10:09:00 GMT

How do you create content that is usable on a cell phone? The answer is by using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML).

In this article, we explain what these technologies are and how the Microsoft FrontPage Web site creation and management tool can make deploying new, wireless accessible content easy.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=3661614

Replace lost Office product keys

dave — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 02:02:00 GMT

Every so often we get a request for help from someone who has lost their product key. To obtain a new product key for your Office program in the United States, call 1-800-936-5700 and speak to a Microsoft customer service representative. For more information visit the Microsoft Office Online Web site.

Using FrontPage 2003 and Visual Studio .NET Together

dave — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 21:44:00 GMT

Read an excerpt from Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Inside Out where Jim Buyens explains how programmers using Visual Studio.NET and designers using FrontPage 2003 can work on the same physical copy of a Web site and how they can take the best advantage of each program.

How to Create a Custom Hit Counter

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:23:00 GMT

To create a custom image for the FrontPage hit counter, follow these steps:

Open any image editing program that is capable of saving files as .GIF images, such as Microsoft Image composer.

Note: The hit counter works only with .GIF images.
Create an image that is 200 pixels wide and 40 pixels high.
Evenly place text for the numbers 0 through 9 from left to right.

If your image editor program has the ability to place a grid on the
image, you may want to use this feature to better align the text. In this example, the graphic for each number is 20 pixels wide.

The numbers should be lined up as follows:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
After you are satisfied with the look and alignment of your image, save the image as a .GIF image. For the file name, use "Counter.gif" (without the quotation marks).

After you create the image, import the image into your FrontPage Web. To do this, follow these steps:

Open your Web in FrontPage.
In Folders view, make sure that your images folder is the open folder. If it is not, click the folder in the All Folders pane to open it.
On the File menu, click Import.
In the "Import" dialog box, click Add File.
In the "Add File to Import List" dialog box, locate the Counter.gif file on your hard disk, select the file, and click Open.
In the "Import File to FrontPage Web" dialog box, click OK.

The file has been imported to your Web; however, you must add a counter to your page.

To add the counter to your page, follow these steps:

In Page view, open the page you want to use the counter on.
Click your page to place the insertion point in the location in which you want the hit counter to appear.
On the Insert menu, click Component, and click Hit Counter.
In the Hit Counter Properties dialog box, click Custom Image.
In the Custom Image text box, type "images/counter.gif" (without the quotation marks).
Save the page.
To test the counter, click File, and click Preview In Browser.

NOTE: You may have to edit the image in your image editing program several times to get the placement and look of the numbers correct. The size of the image does not matter to the hit counter, but it is a good idea to create images that have widths that are divisible by 10.

Example: 100 pixels, 200 pixels, 300 pixels.

How do I remove an Add-in in Frontpage?

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:20:00 GMT

On the Tools menu in FrontPage 2000/2002, click Add-ins.
Select the add-in you would like to uninstall.
Click Remove.
Click OK.

If it was added to the toolbar:

On the Tools menu, click Customize.
With the Customize dialog box displayed, click the Add-ins menu item
Drag the add-in menu item off of the menu.

You can find great add-ons for FrontPage at the FrontPage Add-in Center.

Using non-standard fonts

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:15:00 GMT

One of the minor drawbacks of FrontPage is that it allows you to select any font, that is registered on your PC, to design your web pages. I say this is a drawback because many web designers aren't aware that you can't use any font you'd like and have your site appear the way you designed it on all PCs.

Why? Because when a browser renders a web site it can only use fonts that are installed on that PC. So if you used a non-standard font on your page (ex: Garamond Extra Bold), and the font you specify is unavailable, the text will appear in the default font which is set by the user's browser.

There are only a few fonts that you can rely on the majority of people having installed on their PCs. Times New Roman, Arial and Courier are on most computers though some Macs will not have them. Other commonly available ones are Verdana and Tahoma.

Tip: When specifying a font you can select more than one so that you can control what the browser chooses. For example, you could use <FONT FACE = "Verdana, Arial, Times"> and the browser will render the first font in your list that's available on the user's PC before it chooses their default font.

So what if you really want to use a particular font? There a a few things you can do. One way is to make the text into an image. The downside of this is that images can slow the loading of your site. Another way is to "embed" the font into your page.

To embed fonts in your page you can download the Web Embedding Fonts Tool (WEFT), which lets you create "font objects" that are linked to your Web pages.

You can read more about fonts and typography on Microsoft's web site.

Adjusting your site for different Screen Resolutions

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:10:00 GMT

Have you ever spent hours trying to get your site to look just right and then viewed it on another PC at a different screen resolution? If I design a site, I want to be sure that it stays the way I wanted it to look no matter what screen resolution the visitor is using. How do you accomplish this?

Tables.

Tables can be a web designer's best friend when it comes to achieving the perfect look. If you just want to make sure your site fits in all browsers you can set up a table set to 100% width and then put your content inside of it. This will insure that it expands and grows to the width of the user's browser no matter what screen resolution they have.

If you want to be sure that your site stays the same in all screen resolutions then you would use tables and cells locked at a specific number of pixels to keep things from distorting.

A few years ago it was good practice to always design for the most commonly used screen resolution - 640x480 but these days, most PCs come pre-set up for screen resolutions of 800x600 or higher. One tip when using tables set to a specific number of pixels is to remeber to take into account that you don't have the full height and width of the browser to take advantage of. You have to account for the scroll bars, menu bars, tool bars etc. For example, at 640x480 you may want to set your table to a width of 595.

An alternate way of doing this is to set up different pages and use a screen redirect script to redirect your users depending on their browser settings.

Creating Custom Scroll Bars

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:08:00 GMT

Internet Explorer 5 added a new ability for web designers to take advantage of. That was the ability to customize and add colors to their scroll bars. This is done using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

And example would look like this:

<HEAD>
<style type="text/css">
body {
scrollbar-arrow-color: #6C000E;
scrollbar-base-color: #1D50AC;
scrollbar-dark-shadow-color: #1D50AC;
scrollbar-track-color: #2559AF;
scrollbar-face-color: #FFCC66;
scrollbar-shadow-color: #000000;
scrollbar-highlight-color: #D9D9D9;
scrollbar-3d-light-color: #FFCC66;
}
</style>
</head>

You can enter the colors using regular names (such as green, black, red etc) or HEX values (such as# D9D9D9, #000000, etc). Also, you do NOT need to use all of the lines above.

If you're not familiar enough with creating stylesheets you can go to EchoEcho.Com and use the custom scroll bar generator to create the code you need to put into your page's <HEAD> section.

This only works in Internet Explorer 5+ but it will not affect the look of your site in earlier versions or other browser such as Netscape.

Streaming Real Audio or Real Video

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:06:00 GMT

Is it possible to stream Real Audio or Real Video without a streaming media server?

Yes. You can go to www.real.com and get Real Producer. Once you've created your file you can have the program create the HTML page for you and choose the option for a site with out a "Real Server". Here's how it works:

(This is a Real Audio Example but you can do the same thing with Video)

RealPlayer 5.0 and higher has the ability to play files delivered via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). What this means is that now streaming audio can be delivered in the same manner as a gif or text file without requiring Progressive Network's proprietary PNM protocol.

How to Set up Content without a Real Server

After you have created your .ra file with your Real tools, you would create a text file with the extension .ram. In this text file, you would make a reference to your .ra file so that the server can serve it. The contents of the file would be:

http://yourdomain.com/path_to_file/file.ra

On your web page, you would reference the .ram file, NOT the .ra file (i.e., http://yourdomain.com/path_to_file/file.ram). If you reference the .ra file, it will download completely to the client system before playing. The .ram file is the one that facilitates streaming audio.

Real Content with a Real Server

Why would you want to use a Real Server? If you are serving large or high-quality files, you may want to consider using the PNM protocol. HTTP is not quite as robust as PNM and HTTP is best suited for those serving smaller files or not insistent upon the absolute best sound quality.

Disabling Right-Click

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 06:00:00 GMT

One question that I get a lot of is people wanting to know how to disable the right-click menu in a user's browser so they can't download images and graphics from their site. This also goes hand-in-hand with the questions about preventing users from stealing content off of a web site. Here's the only real way to prevent this:

Don't publish it to your site!

There are all kinds of JavaScript and other tricks you can use to disable the right-click, most of which will just annoy your users, but in the end there is NO possible way to prevent users from getting your content.

Even with right-click disabled people can still get the images and files they want from their Temporary Internet Files cache, doing a View Source on your page and browsing directly to it, copy and pasting the information, choosing Save As from the File menu and a number of other ways to defeat this.

The best you can do is use a service, like Digimarc, to digitally "sign" or watermark your images so they can be tracked.

How to convert a folder to a web (subweb)

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:35:00 GMT

In FrontPage you can easily convert any folder in a web into a subweb. Because each subweb can have its own set of permissions for who can author, browse, or administer it, you can set up individual subwebs with different levels of permissions and different groups of users.

For example, you might set up different subwebs for Marketing and Human Resources; within the Human Resources subweb, you might have different subwebs with different permissions for job postings, employee records, and even the employee handbook. Only recruiters could update the job postings subweb, but everyone in the company could browse it. Only Human Resources managers could browse and author the employee records subweb, while everyone in the company could browse (but not author) the employee benefits web.

Warning Do not convert the root folder (for example, C: or D:) of your computer's hard drive to a web. Doing so may render your hard drive unusable.

In the Folder List, right-click the folder you want to convert to a web, and then click Convert to Web on the shortcut menu.

Notes:

Pages that include other files may not be updated when the included files change.
Hyperlinks on navigation bars may be linked to pages outside the new web.
The larger the contents of the folder, the longer it will take to convert the folder to a web. For a large folder, this process could take several minutes.

How to create a hidden folder

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:27:00 GMT

If you create a folder and precede its name with an underscore (for example, _database), the folder is only hidden from FrontPage views. Such folders are useful for files that do not need to be seen in FrontPage views; however, the folder's contents can be viewed by site visitors browsing the web. If you want a folder to display in FrontPage views, select the Show documents in hidden directories check box on the Advanced tab in the Tools, Web Settings dialog box.

When you create a new web, FrontPage automatically creates a hidden folder named _private to store form results. This hidden folder created by FrontPage cannot be viewed by site visitors browsing your web. If you want additional folders that cannot be viewed by site visitors, you can create subfolders below the _private folder, or you can contact your web administrator for instructions on how to make a hidden folder.

Note: I use _database here as an example. If you are using a database in your web, the most secure way of safeguarding your database is to maintain it OUTSIDE of the web structure.

How to jump to a specific line number in your code

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:26:00 GMT

If you've ever received an error on your page, that indicates a problem at a specific line number, it may be easy enough to track that error down. But what if it's a large page or contains a lot of coding? Then how do you find the line number quickly?

If you switch to HTML View, by clicking on the HTML tab in Page view, you can easily jump to a specific line number in your code.

Right-click anywhere in the HTML tab, and then click Go To on the shortcut menu.
In the Enter line number box, type the number of the line you want to go to.

Tip: If you look in the left corner of your status bar (in HTML View) you'll see the line number and column number displayed.

How do I set up my server to send email when using FrontPage forms?

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:25:00 GMT

In order to send email from a FrontPage form you need to configure the FrontPage Server Extensions to send email.

In Internet Information Server:

Right-click on your web and choose Properties.
Click on the Server Extensions Tab.

For FrontPage 2002:

Click on Settings.
Your browser will launch and the Change Configuration Settings web-based administration form will appear.
Enter in your SMTP mail server and the email address that will appear as the From and Reply To addresses when a form is submitted.
Click Submit.

For FrontPage 2000 and FrontPage 98:

Select the option to specify how email should be sent.
Enter in your SMTP mail server and the email address that will appear as the From and Reply To addresses when a form is submitted.
Click Ok.

Applies to:

Internet Information Server 6.0
Internet Information Server 5.0
Internet Information Server 4.0

How do I get text to wrap around my images?

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:19:00 GMT

Although FrontPage does not have all the power of a traditional desktop publishing program, there are a few ways you can accomplish this.

Method #1:

Right-click on your image.
Choose Picture Properties from the menu (in FrontPage 98 this will be called Image Properties).
Click on the Appearance Tab.
Set the Alignment to the desired location of the image.
Change the values of the Horizontal and Vertical spacing to control the space around the text and the image.
Click Ok.
On your screen you will see a square box with an arrow inside of it near the image. Drag the arrow to the spot in your text where you want the image to wrap.

Method #2:

Create a single cell table.
Insert your image into the table.
Right-click on the table.
Choose Table Properties.
Under Layout set the Float property to the desired direction of the image.

Applies to:

All Versions

How do I remove the blue border around my images?

dave — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 01:17:00 GMT

You can do this from the picture properties dialog box.

Right-click on your image.
Choose Picture Properties (in FrontPage 98 this will be called Image Properties) from the menu.
Click on the Appearance Tab.
Set the Border thickness to 0 (zero).
Click Ok.

Applies to:

FrontPage 2003
FrontPage 2002
FrontPage 2000
FrontPage 98

How do I create a "back" button or link on my site?

dave — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:52:00 GMT

There are several ways to do this.

You can create a hyperlink to an image or text using the following code:

<a href="Javascript:history.go(-1)">Back</a>

Note: (-1) means go back one page. So, for example (-2) would be go back two pages.

or:

You can use:

<a href='javascript:history.back()'>Back</a>

For "Buttons" you can use:

<form method="POST" action="Javascript:history.go(-1)">
<input type="submit" value="Back" name="Back">
</form>

How do I "redirect" a user to another page?

dave — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:38:00 GMT

You can use the following method to redirect a user to another page on YOUR site, another site or simply to refresh the current page. This is accomplished using the META tags.

There are two methods:

Switch to HTML View.

in the <head> section of your code, put:

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="4; url=nextpage.htm"> or
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="4; url=http://www.xyz.com/">

content = is the number of seconds to wait before redirecting the page.
url = is the page you want to send the user to. If you just want to refresh the page they're on, put in that page's name here.
In FrontPage:

Choose Format | Background and choose the Custom tab. In the System Variables Dialog, choose Add.

In the Name field type Refresh

and in the Value window type 4; url=nextpage.htm (note: do NOT use quotes.)

Add Page to Favorites

dave — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 15:31:00 GMT

You can use the following JavaScript code to allow your users to add your web site to their Favorites list.

<head>
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">

</script>
</head>