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From:  Valerie Sutton
Date:  Thu May 25, 2000  9:03 pm
Subject:  Lessons in web design :-)))


SignWriting List
May 25, 2000

Hello Everyone!
I am happy to say our web sites are back up and running ;-)

If anyone finds some broken links or other problems, please tell me!

And Bill...Thank you for your great message (pasted below). You were
"right on the money". That is exactly what happened...all that you
mentioned below at some point happened last night!

For those new to web design.....you might enjoy learning briefly about this...

Try to imagine a paper document that has 800 pages. That is a LARGE
document. Now imagine that you want to change the page numbers on all
800 pages...that would be an overwhelming task!

Well, by my re-organizing our 800 web pages, I had a similar task - I
had to change the links on those 800 pages to work correctly with the
new web page addresses.

So I thought it would be easy, only because there are wonderful
software programs today, that can do that kind of thing
automatically, if all goes well...(notice IF all goes well ;-)))

The first thing that happened is that PageMill, which is a great
Macintosh program for smaller web sites, ran out of memory, as it was
changing all the links. So in the middle of the job, it stopped
uploading and said there was no more memory.

Then when I increased the memory, it never allowed me to upload
again...because (as Bill said below)- there were errors now in the
links and it just was a MESS. And doing all those links manually is
no joke!

So finally, at 2:00 in the morning I took down the entire site, and
uploaded from scratch with another program called Fetch...and the
whole site was up in around 5 hours - you can imagine I didn't sleep
much.

I had to do that, because as Bill said, there were duplicate files
that were creating confusion for the links...

Then, once it was up, I checked it and literally ALL the icons were
NOT showing up on the web pages - that means no one can navigate
around the site....so of course I still had a problem. Then I went
back in the web design and checked it with different software, and it
said there "were NO errors" - which was impossible since the icons
were not showing up!

So I moved all the icons to another location on the site, and then
re-linked them, and then uploaded the entire site a second time - and
we now have a working web site!

Thanks for our excellent advice, Bill!

I will be posting an announcement about the new web page addresses
later tonight - I think you will see that it will be easier to
understand how to find a page on the SignWritingSite, if you ever get
lost, so this change is worth it in the long run, and the web
addresses will remain the same now for years to come..(I am not going
through that again for awhile - ha!)

Val ;-)

-----------------------------

At 12:07 PM -0400 5/25/00, Bill Reese wrote:

>The first thing that came to my mind was that you might have exceeded some
>quota established by your web page server. Whether is be a size limitation
>(megabyte limit) or an upload quota.
>
>The second thing that came to mind is that you have two different versions -
>old and new. Perhaps if you were to delete all files from your web site first
>before adding the new, it might work. There may be name conflicts - one file
>having the same name not being allowed to overwrite an existing file - or
>something like that. Only do this if you have the fully constructed web site
>on your Mac.
>
>You might also try uploading one file at a time. If that works
>then, there may
>be a problem with the way that the whole web site is being uploaded. Perhaps
>there's a problem with one of the files. I'm not familiar with Macs anymore
>but if you can, try checking the validity of the files.
>
>If uploading one file works, try uploading a few files at a time.
>
>Bill

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