Well, dang-diggity-dang it.
I finally decided to start doing some work on moving my WIST (“Wish I’d Said That!” quotations site) stuff from its old home to the subdomain on my site (where it will be “www.wist.info”, hoody-hoo). Since I’d originally planned to do this last September, I figured it was About Time.
Start doing some clean-up of the data. Do an initial FrontPage upload to the domain (which is actually a hosted subdomain of hill-kleerup.org, with the domain name pointing to it). Do a bit more clean-up. Post the changes.
Hmmmm. Odd error message. Take a quick look. Odd. There’s a “www” shortcut in www.wist.info, which when I click on it takes me to my main domain content. Odd.
Well, let’s (cringe) let FrontPage get rid of it. I don’t need it, don’t want it, obviously some weird drug interaction here …
Serve up dinner while the upload is taking place. Going on a while. Weird. “Deleting files in www.wist.info.” That’s staying up there an awful long … OHMYGOD …
Yup. FrontPage was blithely deleting all the frickin’ files in my domain.
Now, the Normal Web Pages (stuff I’ve done through FrontPage) is no great problem. A real annoyance, to be sure, but I can just upload the whole thing.
But my blog stuff … my blog stuff … exists noplace else.
My life flashed before my eyes. Literally, spiralling down into a little black drain.
Many, many, many kudos to the helpful folks at Hosting Matters, who responded to my desperate support board plea in mere minutes, clarified what I wanted (“Restore it all, for the love of God!”), and had it done in mere minutes later.
So … no harm, no foul. Except I lost the stuff I blogged today. I have no idea all the things I posted today, but what I do remember is:
- A really cool post about Bush and the use of evil, and why it makes me uncomfortable, but how a WSJ op-ed piece indicates it’s also not necessarily a bad thing. I really liked what I wrote, and, poof, like a soap bubble, it’s gone.
- How I went to the doctors (stuffy ear since Christmas) and discovered that, since early January, I’ve gone from 248 lbs. to 231 lbs., and how this is still considered “obese” on the BMI chart, but the chances of my dropping to 177 lbs. or to 5’3″ (either of which would move me into the green=good part of the chart) are both equally slim.
- A scathing comment about how DIA will be getting new Federal Screeners sooner than many other airports because we were lucky enough to be contracting to Argenbright (“Hiring Ex-Felons and Lying About It Since 1983!”).
I’m sure there were more (I think there were more), but, Ozymandias-like, all that is left of them are these trunkless legs of stone — er, these bullet summaries.
Bleah.
Ah you’re the one I thank for Hosting Matters. I asked for suggestions months ago and yours is the one I went with. I have been most pleased, thank you. They helped with scripts, they’re helping us get our domains back from the ass-pirate who moved them somewhere without telling us. Good people.
Oh, and Front Page? No, no, no, no, no…you’d almost be better off using Word to publish your blog than FP. E-mail me for an alternative. 🙂
Friends don’t let friend FrontPage. =)
That is exactly what I’m saying. 🙂
What they all said. ***Dave, for the love of your fanbase, don’t use FrontPage anymore! 🙂
I do not, repeat, do not use FP for my Blog. Bleah.
I do use it for all the rest of my web pages. Hilarity ensues, as reported here.
The main reasons I don’t change?
1. It’s already all in FP.
2. FP has some useful features, which, when they work, are indeed useful. The navigation bars are quite nice — when they don’t automatically reset.
3. FP is, ah, available via my office.
If someone has an alternative (other than Word, fergoshsakes), I’m all ears.
(The particular problem, in this case, I must confess, does not look like a FP problem, but rather lack of clarity both in my thinking and in how subdomains, domain names, IP addresses and home directories work on the hostmatters system. I think I’m getting more info on all of the above, so that I can do what I need to without quite so much hilarity.)
Here’s the thing:
Nothing wrong with FP for making the page.
Using FP to upload the page? Sheer, unbridled lunacy. *Slaps you repeatedly in an “Airplane”-like montage.*
Search your blog for mention of the word “frontpage”. See how many of those mentions are upload errors or weirdness. Just use a nice safe ftp client.
Hmmm. Okay, I can take a look at alternative ways to upload FP webs.
Though I do like FP’s “just upload changed pages” thang.
Hmmm.
(And, yes, I know that, with the number of problems I’ve bitched about with FP, continuing to use it is somewhat less than brilliant.)
I agree with Doyce, WS-FTP (or some similar permutation) is the way to go…you have to try very hard to screw up an upload this way.
As for FP options, I have two. As I said before….E-MAIL ME. 🙂
As for your deleted comments, I of course responded wittily and merrily to them.
Erm, wait, this isn’t an Amber game.