Understanding the FrontPage Include page process
Webmasters know that the FrontPage editor
hides included HTML source. When you view the “code” tab within
the FrontPage editor, FrontPage “hides” the included HTML and
only shows you the webbot call. However, the code that you
are actually editing has the included matter inside it, you just
can't see it.
FrontPage errors when saving
It is very common to get FrontPage errors
when changing a page that is included in many other pages:
- FrontPage sent a message that the
server could not parse” error
- There is no web server found at
http://xxx.com error
These errors are very common when you
change an HTML snippet that is included in thousands of other
web pages. When you save a file that is included in other
files, FrontPage attempts to perform these steps:
0 – Uses the FP
internal metadata to generate a list of pages to re-generate
1 - Removes the
old include file contents from each page
2 - Hardcodes the
new include file content into the affected file, writing the
newly-rendered HTML back into the outbound server directory.
BTW - This is a very unique way to process
includes and I've never seen another software application or
coding language handle includes in this matter.
Sadly, FrontPage will not handle changing
of included content on large web sites with thousands of include
pages. The problem is the size of the site and Microsoft
FrontPage’s limitation to stay connected that long while parsing
through thousands of pages.
Re-publishing - An Alternative to re-generating include
content
When you publish the site, FrontPage takes
the include file and inserts it into every page during the
publishing process so the HTML outbound version on the server
actually has the include files contents hardcoded into it.
Reinstalling the FrontPage extensions also
re-checks all included content. What the FrontPage reinstall
actually does is cycling through every single page, comparing
what's in the rendered HTML file with the actual “current”
contents of the include file. If they are different, FrontPage
will regenerate the pre-rendered HTML. This can be very time
consuming and resource intensive on the webserver.
Your system administrator can also bypass
the FrontPage GUI and manually re-generate include content from
the Linux/UNIX command prompt, using the FrontPage command
interface, fpsrvadm:
1.) Remove the FrontPage extensions
cd /home/xxx/xxx-www
rm .htaccess
rm -rf _*
2.) Reinstall the FrontPage extensions:
cd /usr/local/frontpage/currentversion/bin
./fpsrvadm.exe -o install -t apache-fp -s /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
-m
xxx.com -u $linuxowner -pw $password -p 80 -xUser
$linixowner -xGroup xxxgrp
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