Extending Finger...
April 4th, 2004
I was asked to update a random website recently because this particular community lost their web guy. They just wanted some simple updates and tweaks to existing information. No big deal.
Well now, I found out what "FrontPage extensions" are. I already knew of FrontPage, Microsoft's WYSIWYG web editor, but these extensions were new to me. Now it's a somewhat bigger deal. Apparently the official word on using FrontPage extensions is that you must publish through Microsoft FrontPage and you cannot work with the website through FTP. At all.
This is why someone, one day, came up with the phrase, "WTF?!".
Yes, FTP is the most basic way of administrating a website. Anything that says you can't use it, is unquestionably evil. It is also a liar, coincidentally, at least in the case of FP extensions. Oh, and Microsoft discontinued FrontPage for Mac a long time ago, which makes it rather difficult for me even if I wanted to use FrontPage to fix up the website.
On my way to discovering what the hell FrontPage extensions were, I ran into an interesting newsgroup thread about FTP and FrontPage extensions. I was hoping for some detailed information to come out of it, but alas, I knew there would be little help when I read the ninth post. The following was posted by a Microsoft MVP in response to someone trying to get more detailed information about using FTP on websites entrenched in FP extensions without fucking them up:
Can you explain why you feel you and others need to use FTP on a FP enabled web site?
Man, is that straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest or what? Just replace "use FTP on a FP enabled web site" with "question the asylum's policies" and you're set.
Fortunately, it looks like I found out what I needed to know anyway. Here is a link to information about using FTP with FP extensions. The consensus seems to be that as long as you don't mess with "webot" stuff in the html files, it won't corrupt the FP extensions. And in case anyone is too lazy to follow the link, don't ever touch _vti* directories or anything to do with them. Else FrontPage sticks a shotgun in its mouth and tugs on the trigger.
