Working with FrontPage and Radio

As I mentioned in the beginning, overcoming the "mindset" that all web sites are basically the same is the hardest thing you have to deal with when working with these tutorials.  Let's start with looking at the WWW folder on our hard drive that stores all of our Radio Weblog content. One of the first things you notice is that there are no HTML files!  Now that's strange.  How am I supposed to work with my content in FrontPage if I can't find the files?

Understanding the structure of the WWW folder and how it all works was perhaps the hardest concept to overcome before I could start working with Radio files and folders in FrontPage.  The WWW folder contains the pages that allow you to edit your WebLog (via your browser) or read RSS-based news.

Radio Weblogs are web sites, they can be viewed on the web, but Radio itself  is actually a Content Management System.  Huh?  Ok, time to do something I haven't done in a while.  Read the documentation.  Without going into all the gory details, suffice it to say that you can add your own pages to the www folder and Radio easily upstreams them to your site and that means we can use FrontPage.

Upstreaming

I wanted to spend a minute talking about Upstreaming since it's a critical part of how we need to deal with Radio in FrontPage.  When you work with a web site there are normally 3 basic steps; design the site, add content, and publish the site.  There's obviously more to it, like testing and maintenance, but these three are the key areas.

So how does Radio deal with these?  Actually, Radio deals with all of these for you with the exception of adding content to the site.  When you add a daily entry, story, category or make any other changes to your Weblog, these changes are stored in your WWW folder and then published or "upstreamed" to the content server.  Even if you make no changes, as long as Radio is running it will continuously check your WWW folder and publish any new content, files or folders it finds unless you specifically turn upstreaming off.

So how does this apply when using FrontPage?  It means that if you're working on an article but haven't finished it yet, and it's in your WWW folder then, it's going to get published the next time you start Radio whether you want it to or not (unless you turn upstreaming off).  You can use special # "pound" directives to turn off upstreaming for a folder but I'm not going to get into that yet.

Last update: 1/20/2003; 8:30:49 PM.

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