Jan's HTML Basics:Publish Web (FrontPage)

Before you let the world see what you have written, you should make sure everything is in good working order.

Reporting Bar

To access the various reports that FrontPage can create, you can click

the Reports button on the View bar. The first time in a session that you use this button, FrontPage will create the Site Summary, which has links to the most frequently used reports. It may take a few minutes if you have a lot of pages. After you choose a report, to get back to the Site Summary you must use the Reports drop list on the Reporting Bar. This toolbar appeared when you clicked the Reports button.

What Does Publishing Do?

Step-by-Step: Publish Web

What you will learn:

to use the Broken Links report
to use the Unlinked Files report
to use the Publish Status report
to delete and move unwanted files
to prevent publishing of a file
to publish a web to a new location

Start with: , web hector with hector16.htm

To prepare for publishing to a web server, you need to make sure that all is just right with your web.

Open with Recent Webs

Open FrontPage and from the menu select File | Recent webs and then select your web hector .

If your web is not in the list of recent webs, then too many other webs have been opened since you last opened hector. You will have to use the Open command and navigate to the web.

Report: Broken Links

In the Site Summary you will initially see a large number of "Unverified hyperlinks". You must let FrontPage verify all the links before the list of Broken Links will be accurate.

Click on the Reports button. The Reporting bar appears.

Reporting Toolbar

In the right pane you will see Building the Site Summary report... There is no progress bar to let you know how the "building" is progressing. FrontPage may spend several seconds creating its reports. The larger the web, the longer it will take. Several of the reports are about links.
Click on the Unverified hyperlinks report. FrontPage pops up a message box to ask if you want it to check all the hyperlinks.
Click on OK. FrontPage begins to check all the links. This can take quite a long time, especially if there are a lot of URLs to web sites to check. Scroll the list and notice what pages the broken links are in.

A green check marks a link that worked.
A broken link from a chain marks a link that did not work.

Hmmm. There are a bunch of broken links in documents that you have not even worked with yet! What are these documents?? These are from the resource files that you copied into the web earlier. You don't need to be publishing all of these now.

There are also several versions of Hector's page. You will move the older ones out of the web shortly.

A broken link to another web site may not actually be broken. It may just mean that the site's server was too busy to reply to FrontPage's attempt to contact it. Or, the page at the URL may automatically redirect the browser to a different page. It is wise to test such 'broken' links in a browser yourself before deleting or changing them.

Report: Unlinked Files

First you find the unlinked files. Then you decide what to do about them. You have four choices of what to do with unlinked files.

Delete
Move to a folder outside the web (with Explorer)
Mark as 'Don't Publish' (with FrontPage.)
Leave alone.

Be careful about deleting! If your pages use scripts to open pages or change images, FrontPage will not know that those files are being used. They will show up as unlinked files even though they are important to your site.

Since you have no scripts in your small site for Hector, any unlinked files are candidates for deleting or moving out to another folder.

Click on the Reports button on the Reporting bar and select Problems | Unlinked Files .

Wow! What a lot of unfamiliar images and documents.

It's decision time! You will use all four choices above to clean up your web.

Delete from List

You won't need some of these unlinked files any more. You can delete them using the list of unlinked files.

Click on the column label Name. The column is resorted in alphabetical order.
Select by holding the CTRL key down while you click on the following images, which are in non-web formats:
hchavez.tga
hchvez.wmf
pyramids.png
pyramids.tif
pyramids.wmf
pyramids.wpg
Right click on the selection and, from the popup menu, select Delete .
In the confirmation box, choose Yes to All. The images are deleted from your disk. That was easy!

Move: Explorer

You might need your previous versions of Hector's page later if you mess up. It is wiser to just move them for now instead of deleting them.

You must go out to an Explorer window in order to move files and folders to a location outside the web.

Open an Explorer window and display the contents of the web hector.
Select all the versions of Hector's page except the latest one, hector16.htm.
Move the selected files by dragging them to the folder web on your disk, one level up from hector. Your earliest versions of the page are already there. If you are asked to confirm replacing hector6.htm, click on OK.
Now move the folders Exercises and NZ from hector up to web.
Switch back to FrontPage where the Unlinked Files list is still showing. Are the pages you moved are still showing in the list. FrontPage is not aware yet of what you did outside of FrontPage.
Click on the Folders button in the Views bar. It will take FrontPage a few seconds to bring up the list of files and folders from Drive A. Are the files you moved listed?

No, they are gone. But wait! You had not looked at the Folder view before. What about a view that you have seen before? Sometimes there the views don't match.
Click on the Page button in the Views bar. Are the files and folders you moved listed still in the Folder List? If they are, it is because FrontPage has a cache of data that is not always up-to-date when you make changes outside FrontPage. You must make FrontPage refresh its information. <sigh>
If necessary, click on a file in the Folder List and press the F5 key to Refresh the display. Are the files and folders listed? They should be gone now, safely in the web folder.
Click on the Reports button again. The Unlinked Files report comes back. The files you moved aren't in the list now. FrontPage was forced to look at the web again and revise the report.

Report: Publish Status

There are two Word documents left in this web from the resource files. They will not be needed in Hector's web site. You can mark them as "Don't Publish".

The "Don't Publish" feature can be handy but it is also dangerous. It is easy to forget to change the setting back to "Publish" when you really do want the file published with the rest of the web. Always check for "Don't Publish" files before you publish.

In the Unlinked Files report, click on the column label Type to sort the files by file type. The Word documents are now at the top, with extension .doc.
Select the two Word documents.
Right click and click on Don't Publish .

This menu choice will have a checkmark by it if the selection is already set to not publish.
From the Reporting bar, open the Publish Status report.
Reports | Workflow | Publish Status
Again sort the list, this time by clicking on the column label Publish. The files marked "Don't Publish" are at the top.
Don't Publish icon : The icon for the Word doc may have changed first to by adding a symbol at the bottom left to show that the file will not be published. It's a tiny change, but is very helpful, once you get used to looking for it. It seems to be a clock set to 3:00. (I have no idea why!) Later the file will show the document icon with a white X on a red circle. Much clearer.

Final Checks

The last steps in preparing to publish are similar to what you would do to check any document before printing or sharing it with others.

Run Spell Check.
Read carefully and look for grammar errors, typos, repeated words, and substitutions that spell check will not catch (like "in" for "is").
Open Internet Explorer and view the pages in the web. Check for correct appearance on the page at various window sizes.
Test all the links to see that they go where they are supposed to go.

Publish to Hard Disk (Backup Copy)

Publishing to a disk is a good way to make a backup copy of your web. The process is the same as to a web server except you will not have to login with username and password.

Save and close any pages that are open in FrontPage.
From the menu select File | Publish Web...
Do not use the Publish button on the toolbar because FrontPage would start publishing to the last location it used - without offering you the chance to change it!

In FrontPage 2002 you get a dialog with a green checkmark beside each file that will be published. Beside a file that will not be published is a red circle with a white X. To change the Publish Status of a file, right click on it and click on Don't Publish .
Click on the Change button. The Publish Destination dialog appears.
Click on Browse and navigate to C:\My Documents\My Class.
Create a new folder using the New Folder button. Name it hector-yourname, but replace "yourname" with your own name.
Click on the Open button to close the dialog and return to the Publish Web dialog.
Click on the Options button.
Choose "Changed pages only". This is a good setting for most situations. FrontPage will compare the file lists in the two locations and only upload new or changed ones. This saves a lot of uploading time when you are just making corrections.

The choice "All pages, overwriting..." can save time when the site is fairly small because it just uploads everything without comparing. There is no delay for comparing file lists.
Check the box Log changes during publish.
Click on OK to close the Options dialog.
Click on Publish to publish your web to the hard disk. You will see a warning message saying that the web does not exist and would you like to create one.
Click on OK. You will see a progress bar and the names of the files as they are copied. It will take a while to copy the web from a floppy disk.

When the process is finished, you will see a message that your site was published successfully. There is a link to the log file and one to the web site.
Click on the link to the log file. Scroll the list to see what all you published.

The next time you publish this information will be replaced. If you want to keep a copy for later, use the browser's File | Save command.