"What means FOC?" - "Well, that's when a man and are woman are in love and the man puts his..."
- Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
"...no, no, I mean F.A.Q.!" - "Ah, that! It means Frequently Asked Questions..."
- Paris Community Leader
And this is our hit list of what we the CLs and the
Help Forum
get asked most frequently. We do sincerely hope that you will find an answer to
your question here without having to run around trying to find somebody to help you.
If not, please remember that your community leaders
are only an email away! If emailing one, you should always include your Geo
address and the name of the file you're having problems with.
If the image is located in your addbook.html, please read Question 3.
1 Go to the file manager, log in and check whether the file is really there and doesn't have zero bytes. Click on view - do you see it? Alternatively, enter its URL in the location line of your browser. Like, if your address is Paris/2472 and your image is Paris.gif, you enter http://www.oocities.org/Paris/2472/Paris.gif. You should see the image then.
2 Compare the spelling of the file name as it is in the code with the name that appears in the file manager. Are they exactly the same? Remember that web servers are case sensitive!
3 Check your source code. Assuming that your background image file
is called "background.jpg", the BODY tag should contain the string
(a so-called tag option) background=background.jpg. A typo
would result in the option being ignored.
If it's an inline image, the tag should read <img src=image.jpg>.
If you create your pages offline and you use a WYSIWIG editor such as
Navigator Gold/Composer or Microsoft FrontPage, the editor might have used
the path as it is on your harddisk, e.g.
<img src=file:///c|/mypages/Paris.gif>.
First of all, if you have just signed up for a page in Geocities, you should take care to "move in" within a week. This means editing your main page, index.html, and uploading a few more pages.
The next step should be to find a theme for your page. It doesn't have to be sensational, just something you are interested in and feel you could write about for ages.
Now that you have something to write about, you can start learning HTML, how to format text, include pictures and colours etc. There are a couple of tutorials on the web to help you with this. Some deal not only with HTML, but also with general issues setting up a homepage in Geocities, e.g.
Although the design of your addbook form is defined in addbook.html, what
your guest sees is not that file, but something dynamically generated with
addbook.html as a template, so to speak. The URL is completely different,
so any link and image have to have the absolute URL, as in
<img src=http://www.oocities.org/Paris/2472/Paris.gif> instead of
<img src=Paris.gif>.
The contents of the guestbook are stored in the file geobook.html in your home directory. You can edit it like any other HTM file, but it's best to do it online, in the file manager, to minimize the probability of overwriting an entry that has been made while you were at it. It's also a good idea to make a backup of the file beforehand in case you inadvertently destroy the code.
In the file manager, tick the checkbox in front of geobook.html and click the "edit" button below. Make sure the advanced HTML editor is selected. Now browse for the offending entry and delete everything from the REMOTE ADDR tag in front of it up to the next REMOTE ADDR tag and save it.
If somebody is severely harassing you through the guestbook, you should copy geobook.html
to a different filename and contact a community leader
to discuss how the perpetrator can be identified and stopped.
Don't. Granted, they are annoying, but remember that Geocities are providing quite a lot of webspace for free. To provide 11 megs to over a million people means quite a lot of investment in fast servers, memory, harddisks, and above all, people who keep the hard- and software running. The money needed comes from advertisers, and to please them and make the money flow, their ads must pop up all over the place.
If you want to get rid of the pops, you can include the geoguide on your page,
or join geoplus.
There are a lot of possible reasons for this.
One of them is that you didn't
use the correct link - read Question 3.
The most frequent cause is that you didn't use the correct link, which is
<a href="/cgi-bin/geoplus_apps/ans_entry"> for everybody.
The link has to be located on a page in the homestead you have created
the guestbook in. E.g. if your guestbook is in Paris/2472, you have to
put the above link onto a Paris/2472 page. It doesn't work if the link
is located in Paris/4440, neither does it work if you link to
<http://www.oocities.org/Paris/2472/addbook.html> from anywhre on the web.
Another reason is a simple network or server problem. The programme that generates
the guestbook isn't necessarily located on the same server as your guestbook, so it's
possible that the other server is down or too busy to process the request generated
when the "submit" button is hit. Problems of that kind are typically temporary and
likely to go away after a while.
First of all, ou should try the lost password utility to have your password sent yet again. If nothing arrives within several hours, it's likely that you have mistyped your email address when signing up, so the email containing your password is now happily sailing the seas of nirvana.
Still, there's nothing to worry about as it happens frequently of more experienced
GeoSteaders, and as the account you've signed up for will be deleted after a week.
Just sign up again. You will have to give a different email addy this time (unelss
your account has already been deleted), but you can get one from iname,
yahoo, hotmail etc. easily. If you have your mind set on exactly that
one address because it contains your lucky numbers, you should closely watch
it one week after you signed up for it, because then it will become vacant again.
Make sure that you have, in fact, moved in. You are considered moved in if you have edited index.html and created/uploaded another HTML file. If you fail to do that within a week, your account will be deleted.
If you're absoultely sure you have moved in, there could be a database error
or software bug. You should contact a community leader
rightaway to give them enough time to get help for you before the account is
deleted. Just in case, make sure that you have an offline backup of all the
files that make up your page(s).
If you have questions of that kind, you really sould take the time to read a good HTML tutorial. some are linked from the Resources Page.
The HTML code for a link to the Paris Community Pages would be
like this:
<a href=http://www.oocities.org/Paris/2472/index.html>
Paris Community Pages</a>
It consists of
The above is an absolute URL; the alternative would be a relative URL.
Absolute URLs always work, no matter where your page is located in relation to the file you want to link. They are used whenever the file to be linked is on a different server, but it's a good idea to use them if you're unsure whether a relative URL would work.
Relative URLs are shorter as they only give the path to the file you
want to link in relation to your page. You should use them especially
if you have lots of links, because every character makes your page larger and
thus slower to load. Plus you will have fewer links to edit if your page is moved.
If the linked file is on the same server as yours, you can leave out the
server part:
<a href=/Paris/2472/index.html>
If the linked file is in your own directory, it would be <a href=index.html>.
See Subdirectory Tutorial for details on relative and absolute links.
Why, no problem! Apart from asking your friends, you can always post this
request in the Geocities forums. For an honest, impartial assessment complete
with tips and hints for further improvement, write a nice email to a
community leader near you who will, i can assure
you, be delighted to help!
Make sure that you should have received something e.g. by sending yourself a mail from a different account.
If you don't get the test mail within, say, half an hour, make sure that you have entered the address correctly. It consists of your membername followed by @oocities.com. Mail servers, including mail.oocities.com, usually don't like charachters outside a-z, 0-9 plus underscore. Does your membername contain any special characters such as àìýôïü çåøþ? If yes, change it.
Next, go through the routine of setting up your email account again, and read all the instructions carefully. Maybe you've overlooked something. Check the setup of your mail client, too: server name, account name (i.e. membername) etc.
If all of this doesn't help, it's time to contact a
community leader.
The easiest method is using the file manager. Log in with your membername and password. Towards the end of the page you get five entry fields with a "browse" button besides each. Click the browse button to select any file from your harddisk. If you want to upload more than five files in one go, select the number from the drop-down menu, then click "display". You'll get up to 20 entry fields then.
Faster but requiring more know-how is FTP. You can use any FTP client, but you
should be halfway familiar with FTP in general. Give ftp.oocities.com
as server, log in with your membername and password. FTP info is available at
FTP Procedures and
Command Line FTP. BTW, if you're pretty sure that you've set up
your FTP client correctly but keep getting errors you can't interpret, try
command line FTP, paste the results to a text or image file and send them
to our FTP/UNIX guru ;) Yoshiwara along
with any info you think necessary.
Basically there's two methods: command line FTP (see a href=ftp.html>command line FTP page)
and FTP with a client software.
Look at the question above, and check out the help links
section for details.
Whoa, that's advanced HTML. The best idea would be to find a good HTML tutorial that deals with forms. Check the ones linked from the resources page.
The only forms I could think of that would be of interest to steaders are
The resources page lists a couple of
free counter providers in the "freebies" section.
This one is related to Question 3 and thoroughly (I hope) explained in the
Subdirectory Tutorial .
You can format text in certain fonts using the tag <font face="Arial, Helvetica"> in front of the text and the usual </font> behind it. It's a good idea to combine font face and font size options in the same tag: <font face=Arial size=4>
The first example means that if the visitor has Arial installed on their system, it will be displayed with that font. If not, Helvetica is second choice. If the visitor has neither installed, the default font will be used. As Arial is a standard of Windows and about 95% of surfers use a Windows system, there's a good chance that the text will be displayed the way you want it.
Note that there is no way to force a certain font in case the surfer hasn't got it installed.
In other words, stick to Windows standard fonts to be on the safe side.
Note also that the font name has to be exactly the same as that of the Windows font.
If you want to use Times New Roman, you would have to type
<font face="Times New Roman">. There have to be quotation marks
around the font name if it consists of multiple words.
