by John S. Krill April 16, 2001
where We Moved To
Our new absolute address is: http://windowsassistance.tripod.com.
Our URL (Universal Resource Locator) is www.windowsassistance.com.
Tripod is another free hosting service. Yep, you still get
ads. Tripods service is not as complete as Yahoo!Geocities but
they offer FrontPage support and it works. You will also notice
that they offer a sub-domain address. You could also get to
Windows Assistance by using https://members.tripod.com/windowsassistance.
 They
also offer 50MBytes of web space. This wasn't a priority since I
only use 3.8MBytes at this time. Yahoo!Geocities basic web space
was 15MBytes.
The one service that Yahoo!Geocities offered that really made
it hard to leave them was Site Statistics. You could get
hit information for every page at your site. You can view
daily/weekly/monthly hits for every page. You can also get
limited information on where your visitors came from. I will
miss this kind of detailed information. Tripod only gives you
the hits for the previous day. No detailed information
what-so-ever. may 1, 2001: Tripod no longer gives you any
traffic information. I have signed-up with hitometer
and they email daily, weekly, and monthly counts for the
homepage or index.html page for this site.
So with reluctance I have moved to Tripod. Why? FrontPage. As
I explained in my previous article
about moving to Yahoo!Geocities I use FrontPage to maintain this
site. The big advantage is the components you have available
such as forms. Yahoo!Geocities has mismanaged their FrontPage
support and they have not responded to mine or any other pleas
for answers.
I have had the Tripod site up since early March 2001 and have
maintained both the Yahoo!Geocities and the Tripod sites since
then. I had hoped that Yahoo!Geocities would get their act
together and fix the problems with FrontPage and if they did I
would probably drop the Tripod site. This hasn't happened.
the FrontPage Problems Explained - Kinda
FrontPage has two important features. One: it allows you to
automatically upload pages to your site. Now you don't have worry
about what you have modified or added. FrontPage will make the
required changes for you. The second advantage is with special
components that are designed to reduce the labor required to
create a site. The most useful component is form creation. The message
form page is done using a FrontPage component and the
confirmation page you see after you submit the form is made
available through the forms component.
The menu you have on each page is an include
component. This component allows you to insert html pages within
html pages. This allows the Web designer to create one menu page
that is use by all pages. This means only one page needs to be
modified and all pages that use it will see the change. On the
Windows Assistance web all pages except the home page use an include
menu.
When I first moved to Yahoo!Geocities late last year
everything worked fine. Then sometime in January 2001
Yahoo!Geocities made some changes. Only problem is that they
didn't tell anyone. Next thing I know I can't automatically
upload the site using FrontPage. This went on for a couple of
weeks before I searched through Yahoo!Geocities help pages and
noticed that the instructions for uploading via FrontPage had been
changed.
Here's what happened. Previously you used http://www.geocities.com/windowsassistance
address to upload this site. This had been changed to http://fp.geocities.com/windowsassistance.
Different sub-domain. No problem. Just change the address and
continue. Yes problem. Because of the changed address I had to
upload the entire site before FrontPage was happy. I have
two other sites at Yahoo!Geocities and I had to do the same with
them. Also the change of sub-domain worked fine if you had a
new site. If you had an existing site the upload wouldn't work.
Finally Yahoo!Geocities fixed this problem. I don't know how
long it took them because I was using FTP to upload the site.
They never informed anyone of the problem and never told us when
it was fixed. Occasionally I would test the upload using
FrontPage and one day like magic it was working!
Everything working just fine? No. We could upload the site
with FrontPage but the forms component wouldn't work. Some of
you experienced this. The only way I found out about this
problem was because one of good visitors informed me.
Yahoo!Geocities finally put up a message that for forms to work
you had to use the fp sub-domain and not the www
sub-domain. So now I had to hardwire the fp.geocities.com/windowsassistance/message.htm
into the menu. Once you were in the fp sub-domain you
were there forever until you were sent directly to the www
sub-domain. Not a problem. Really. One advantage to the fp
sub-domain was no ads. It actually took Yahoo!Geocities over a
month to figure that out!
And all of us were talking about this on the Yahoo!Geocities
message boards. Finally they caught on and denied access
to the fp sub-domain except for FrontPage components.
This means that once you are sent to the fp sub-domain
and use a form then any page you move to will get you an access
denied message. And that's why I'm at Tripod now.
will We Move Again?
I hope this is the last move to a free hosting service.
The next move should be to a for-fee hosting service. With this
type of service I will be able to address www.windowsassistance.com
directly. The only requirement will be FrontPage support.
Another advantage to a for-fee hosting service is e-mail. I will
no longer need to use winassist@techie.com.
may 1, 2001: You may have noticed that the e-mail
address for this site has changed to support@windowsassistance.com.
In short, e-mail sent to any mail box at
windowsassistance.com will be forwarded to winassist@techie.com.
This e-mail address is from mail.com and it is free. The only
problem is that mail.com is now owned by Net2Phone Email, Inc or
EasyLink Services Corporation and the reliability has gone down. Go
to the corporate page for Mail.com and see if you
can figure out who owns this business.
If you create a bookmark with http://www.windowsassistance.com
then you will not have to worry about where the site is located.
It will always get you to the site no matter where it is. Now
let us get back to the business of supporting Windows.
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