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Tuesday, April 16, 2002 |
What a Bad Day!
Man oh man. Today started out wonderfully and then went right down hill. And it was all Microsoft's fault (this time it really was). It started great -- got up, saw that I got a nice mention from Dave (Thanks Dave!) and then said to myself "You know ... I should fix some things I didn't finish in my Radio UserLand docs that Dave mentioned. This will only take a sec..." Well, 7 hours later, I am finally out from under the morass of FrontPage or as I call it "When Bill Gates stole $700 from me". I'm a consultant and for short term engagements, that's my billing rate (yes, it gets a lot cheaper for longer engagements). I spent 7 hours fixing things that FrontPage broke and coding around things that worked fine just yesterday. This included include pages that magically double (nothing like your logo twice for emphasis), a Fix Broken Links that doesn't (and scares the bejesus out of me) and so on. According to FrontPage, my web is now 139 megs in size with over 4,000 files. Maybe I broke it or something. I don't know and I really don't care. I just want a check for $700. Oh and it took FrontPage over 70 minutes to even come up with those stats.
NOTE: Like all flames that I write, this is categorized as "Rant". To see all Rants, click here.
Anyway, I am up and running, my home page no longer relies on FrontPage stuff at all and gives an appropriate sneer to Microsoft before the user moves onto the PHP page that has replaced it.
4:28:22 PM 
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And, So, I Appreciate Radio Even More and Move Away from FrontPage to PHP
My personal home page this morning took a big step. It is no longer a .htm file, it is now a .php file. Here's why. I got up this morning at 5:30ish, hit the shower, saw that Dave mentioned me again and I was totally pumped! Very cool. So, I thought, lets just tweak these files a little bit. GAH! FrontPage has no honor! Ever since 5:45 or so, I've been locked in a bloody maze of FrontPage glitches and hell. It turns out that it has slowly been mucking up for a while -- for example, one of my Radio screen shots was replaced with a lovely picture of a duck. Good god! The broken links view doesn't work. When I put in include pages, it DOUBLES them (nothing like two copies of the same thing on your home page). Bah. A pox upon it. Here's my solution:
- Rename index.htm to indexold.htm. Here's what FrontPage did to my homepage.
- Copy that file to index.php. Use FTP and a good editor to open the file and then remove the doubled include page.
- Add this 1 live of php code: <? include "writing/index_pagebody.htm" ?>
- Save
- Create an index.htm page at my root directory that links to index.php and criticizes FrontPage.
Isn't that a lot easier than mucking about with FrontPage's crap? You'll note that I didn't use FrontPage's link fixing features. Two reasons:
- They are really, really arcane. All I want is the equivalent of search and replace. One dialog box that lets me say "Change this link to that link in all pages" would be all that is needed. Trying to even find a reference to your home page in their links view so that it can be fixed is just horrible (try it when your FrontPage web includes > 3,000 links).
- I'm terrified as to what it might do to my pages. Just damn terrified. Its too risky.
Now do you see why I appreciate Radio even more than ever? Radio isn't yet perfect but it is damn good and with all the resources that Microsoft has, for me to have 2 1/2 hours of my valuable time wasted because of bugs in their product is unacceptable. Radio doesn't do that to me.
Disclaimer: FrontPage user since 1997. I know it like the back of my hand. I'm furious right now.
8:07:39 AM
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© Copyright 2002 The FuzzyStuff.
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