FrontPage Rules for GeoCities

There are some restrictions on using FrontPage at GeoCities, which I have summarized below.

In order to use FrontPage 98 to edit your GeoCities home site, you will have to create a mirror site on your local hard drive. After you make changes to the pages, you will have to FTP the pages, images, and any other files up to your GeoCities home site. Before you get too involved creating your pages locally on your hard drive, you should create a simple 'index.html' file and upload it to GeoCities. This way you will know whether or not your internet connection will support this.

My Publishing Section describes are some of the options for uploading to GeoCities, choose which ever works best for you with you Internet Connection:

Your default home page should be named 'index.html' at GeoCities, if FrontPage created a file with a different name (eg. default.htm), rename it to index.html.

If you are using features of FrontPage that require FrontPage to recognize the home page (eg. navigation bars). The only way I know of changing the name FrontPage recognizes as the default home page, is to go to the Personal Web Server Administration (installed with FrontPage) and change the default home page name there. If the Personal Web Server isn't in your System Tray, you can find it by opening My Computer (on your desktop), then open Control Panel and double click on the Personal Web Server icon.

Your GeoCities home site is Read Only, files can not be written or updated directly. The only way to manipulate your files is by either using GeoCities utilities, or indirectly by FTPing files to GeoCities.

Use relative URLs to your images, page links etc, that are located on your home site. A relative URL is just the file name and extension (example: hello.htm), or sub-directory and file name (example: images/mypicture.jpg), remove any other directory information, if frontpage inserts it. Of course, any links to other sites should contain the full URL (example: http://www.oocities.org/SouthBeach/Sands/1492/ if you want to link to my home page).

Some of the Page templates involve FrontPage Extensions, which as of this writing, GeoCities does not have. So test out a page template at GeoCities before getting to involved with it. This is especially true of the Forum and Guestbook page templates. Also, don't bother using WebBot components that require FrontPage Server Extensions. You can use WebBot components that work directly out of the FrontPage Editor, updating the HTML right away (example: the table of contents, last change date).

Case Sensativity. GeoCities is case sensative, this means that Capitalization makes a difference. The easiest way to avoid problems is to use lower case (do not capitalize) for file names, your GeoCities user id, and your GeoCities password.

Avoiding FrontPage Browse-Time Components which require FrontPage Server Extensions. Most FrontPage components affect the Web only at authoring time. For example, an Include Page component or Table of Contents affects the page it is on only when that page or some other page is created or modified. These FrontPage components are inactive at browse-time. However, some FrontPage components, especially those that are used with forms, rely on the FrontPage Server Extensions at browse-time. If you are transferring your files to a Web server on which the FrontPage Server Extensions are not installed, you should avoid using the following FrontPage components:

	Confirmation Field
	Discussion Form Handler
	Registration Form Handler
	Save Results Form Handler
	Scheduled Image
	Scheduled Include Page component
	Search Form
	Active Server Pages (asp)
	Database Region Wizard (creates asp pages)
	Hit Counter
	Internet Database Connector

For more information, see the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles:

FP: How to Use FrontPage Without the Server Extensions
Article ID: Q143101

FP98: Some FrontPage Components Do Not Work on Disk-Based Webs
Article ID: Q173437