Tubelab web site down for a day

[tubelab.com]

The Tubelab web site has been hosted by Value Web since day one. Value Web was a local company that worked well for 5 years and stayed up during hurricane Wilma so that I could post pictures via dial up even though most of Broward county had no power for up to a month. There was one incident when they went down due to a fire, but all was recovered in less than a day. But Value Web is no more. They have been bought out by Hostway.

Hostway has informed me that they are going to "upgrade your ValueWeb account to the new Hostway platform and billing system." They also state the following:

"YOUR PLAN WILL BE UPGRADED ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 5, 2009. UPGRADES WILL BE PROCESSED BEGINNING AT 8:00 PM EDT AND WE ARE ANTICIPATING AN UPGRADE WINDOW OF LESS THAN 12 HOURS." "Every step has been taken to minimize the downtime associated with this upgrade and access to your site will be made as quickly as possible. We are anticipating Web Site downtime of approximately 4 hours."

There are several other changes being made at the same time and they include this statement:

"Once the upgrade is complete and you have been provided with the necessary access information you will need to remove FrontPage Extensions and create them as new and republish your site from a current backup."

It is not totally clear from their email exactly what is going to happen to the Tubelab web site which is created with Front Page.

I would advise anyone in the middle of building an amplifier to print the pages needed for a day or two of the build.

[danFrank]

Hi,
We are having the same problem with the website for the place I work; as of August 1st, the web will no longer support websites created with Microsoft Frontpage. I don't even think Frontpage is even incuded with Microsoft Office any longer.
It is my understanding that as of this month onward, all websites will have to be made with Adobe's website software (Dreamweaver?). I forget the exact name of Adobe's web software. I think the web will support another company's web building software, but I forget that also. I think many websites will be down because of this reason.
Anybody else have more info on this?

[tubelab.com]

the web will no longer support websites created with Microsoft Frontpage.

I don't think the problem is with the web itself. Microsoft created Front Page early in the evolution of the web. They added all sorts of features which they expected to become standards. The web evolved and the web standards of today especially XML and CSS are not supported by Front Page, and many of the Front Page features never became web standards. In order for a Front Page web site to function correctly The web server that hosts the site must be running "Front Page Extensions". Any web hosting service that still runs the old Front Page extensions should be able to host a site created with FP 2002 or FP2003. Browsers are a different story.

I don't even think Frontpage is even incuded with Microsoft Office any longer.

Front page was bundled in Office 95. It was optional in Office 97 and has been a seperate product until it was killed. I have FP 97, FP2000, FP2002, and FP2003. Front Page 2003 was the last version. Front Page and more importantly the Front Page extensions have not been upgraded or rewritten since then, but the web has evolved.

It is my understanding that as of this month onward, all websites will have to be made with Adobe's website software (Dreamweaver?). I forget the exact name of Adobe's web software.

There are several web site creation products available from the usual companies that allow you to make web sites. Dreamweaver (Adobe) is a popular but expensive ($400) choice. Microsoft has two web site creation tools that conform to the current web standards. There are others.

Microsoft offers the Visual Studio suite which lets you write Visual Basic, C, C# and web applications. It is expensive and complicated and best left to experts. They used to have an Express Edition which is free. I tried it and didn't have much luck.

The "replacement for Front Page" is Microsoft Expressions Web. It claimed compatibility with Front Page created web sites. It has an "import" feature that is supposed to read Front Page sites. It will import the Tubelab site but generates over 300 errors in the process totally trashing the web site. The answer I got from Microsoft is to buy Experssion Web 2 which does a better job importing web sites. This is total BS of course.

I have learned that the real problem with my site is that many of the Front Page features used in the creation of the original site 6 years ago are no longer supported by current web standards. The biggest offenders are the link buttons along the left side of most pages. These and other Front Page tricks are not going to work in ANY web authoring software that conforms to current web standards.

Web browsers are also evolving. IE8 is the first Microsoft browser that claims full compatibility with all current web standards. This means that non compliant web sites may not display correctly. IE8 handles this with "compatibility mode". This mode is invoked when IE8 finds a non compliant web site. Compatibility mode will go away eventually, but we don't know when.

This means that the Tubelab web site and many others will eventually need to be rebuilt using a web standards compliant authoring program. I started down that road over a year ago using Expression Web. I have not finished it.

[CharleyW]

You might want to go to each of the pages on your site, right click, select "View Source", and save the resulting source code.

That will give you the pure html used to generate the page.

When you do the save, remember to save into a directory structure that mirrors your site's directory structure.

You can write a site in any text editor on the planet, from Notepad on up.

[dsavitsk]

Originally posted by CharleyW
You might want to go to each of the pages on your site, right click, select "View Source", and save the resulting source code.

You can use a program called wget to do this all at once for the whole site. Instructions here: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showt...89#post1629789