301 Perm. re-directs and FrontPage
techie stuff : I will add additional info to this post later, but I am putting this here in hopes that others will find this info if they do a seach for it, and save themselves hours of frustration.
Upon the advice of Google engineers at the Webmaster World Conference in New Orleans in June and stated on the Google website, etc...I left instructions in July with my web helper for her to work on changing our .htaccess files on our servers to include a few lines of code that would cause anyone accessing my sites without the www. to be automatically redirected to the www. version.
Little did I know that changing the .htaccess file on a site that uses Frontpage extensions would totally screw up things.
On the surface it appeared that things were working well, the http://mydomain.com did an auto-redirect quickly to the http://www.mydomain.com version and everything seemed fine.
But I couldn't update any sites. It often looked like they were updating on my end...but not to the viewer.
I either got error messages or it appeared to publish and all the files published outside of the docs folder. I stayed on the phone w/ my hosting co tech support for hours while we tried all sorts of things to no avail. Finally I spent hours reading fourms and came to the conclusion that if you use FrontPage, you are not going to get the Apache mod rewrite script to work for you unless you are willing to do some powerful and time consuming stuff that still might not work.
In the end we tried to change the .htaccess files back to the original versions, BUT because I was using an old version of FrontPage 98, it just complicated things. I had to back up all my folders for every site to disk, transfer to a different computer running FrontPage 2000 and make sure I stripped all the oddball FP98 stuff out of the folders first, then import the site's files into the new version of FP and in some cases rebuild the sites w/ all the shared borders and SSI's , and then ask the hosting co to purge the server of all my old files, and totally reset the FP extensions---and then I republished each site as if it was a brand new site.
And of course, along the way there were glitches, some servers didn't want to act right when they tried to reconfigure the FP extensions, etc...and we discovered various things like the user admin interfaces non-functioning on some servers....so the hosting co had some housekeeping to do too.
I still have to keep FP 98 running on the one computer as I have a site that I use that version to work live on the server on just that one site. But even tho it has taken about two weeks to work thru all of this, it is a good thing I suppose, as FP 2000 does an auto correct on spelling (a la MS Word) and goodness knows I need that. I have found and corrected a zillion misspelled words in this process. I know I could have run spell ck on FP 98, I just hardly ever took the time to do it.
I have a copy of FP 2003, but some of the older servers (some of these sites have been up a long time) don't have those extensions installed and no matter what people tell you, stuff is not backwards compatible in FP....I found that out in another incident on another server platform last year after much frustration and wrong info from tech support.
I hope to goodness that Google is able to program the bots to deal with the duplicate content issues that arrise from the www. adn non-www. versions of a website, as I know there are plenty of people out there that use FP, even tho in the forums people are loath to admit that they do.
Upon the advice of Google engineers at the Webmaster World Conference in New Orleans in June and stated on the Google website, etc...I left instructions in July with my web helper for her to work on changing our .htaccess files on our servers to include a few lines of code that would cause anyone accessing my sites without the www. to be automatically redirected to the www. version.
Little did I know that changing the .htaccess file on a site that uses Frontpage extensions would totally screw up things.
On the surface it appeared that things were working well, the http://mydomain.com did an auto-redirect quickly to the http://www.mydomain.com version and everything seemed fine.
But I couldn't update any sites. It often looked like they were updating on my end...but not to the viewer.
I either got error messages or it appeared to publish and all the files published outside of the docs folder. I stayed on the phone w/ my hosting co tech support for hours while we tried all sorts of things to no avail. Finally I spent hours reading fourms and came to the conclusion that if you use FrontPage, you are not going to get the Apache mod rewrite script to work for you unless you are willing to do some powerful and time consuming stuff that still might not work.
In the end we tried to change the .htaccess files back to the original versions, BUT because I was using an old version of FrontPage 98, it just complicated things. I had to back up all my folders for every site to disk, transfer to a different computer running FrontPage 2000 and make sure I stripped all the oddball FP98 stuff out of the folders first, then import the site's files into the new version of FP and in some cases rebuild the sites w/ all the shared borders and SSI's , and then ask the hosting co to purge the server of all my old files, and totally reset the FP extensions---and then I republished each site as if it was a brand new site.
And of course, along the way there were glitches, some servers didn't want to act right when they tried to reconfigure the FP extensions, etc...and we discovered various things like the user admin interfaces non-functioning on some servers....so the hosting co had some housekeeping to do too.
I still have to keep FP 98 running on the one computer as I have a site that I use that version to work live on the server on just that one site. But even tho it has taken about two weeks to work thru all of this, it is a good thing I suppose, as FP 2000 does an auto correct on spelling (a la MS Word) and goodness knows I need that. I have found and corrected a zillion misspelled words in this process. I know I could have run spell ck on FP 98, I just hardly ever took the time to do it.
I have a copy of FP 2003, but some of the older servers (some of these sites have been up a long time) don't have those extensions installed and no matter what people tell you, stuff is not backwards compatible in FP....I found that out in another incident on another server platform last year after much frustration and wrong info from tech support.
I hope to goodness that Google is able to program the bots to deal with the duplicate content issues that arrise from the www. adn non-www. versions of a website, as I know there are plenty of people out there that use FP, even tho in the forums people are loath to admit that they do.
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