Frequently Asked Questions
and
Problems Encountered by District Webspinners

Problem: My links work just fine on my machine but don't work on the web.
Solution:
There are several causes of this problem:

• You have included spaces or special characters in file names

*Remove spaces, $,&,/, and ? from your file names. Your Mac may forgive this, but webservers, including those using the Mac OS, will not. Example: spaces are converted to "%20". The other characters signify arguments submitted to CGIs or parts of directory paths. Use _ where you feel a space is needed in a name.

• Your links don't agree with your filenames. An invisible space in front of a name or at the end are the most frequent culprits. This explains why there sometimes appear to be identical files in the same folder.

*Double check both your links and filenames. Click-sweeping your cursor over the names will reveal extra spaces.

myfile.html

myfile.html

Notice the difference? The second filename includes a space in front. :-0

• The relative positions of your files have changed.

When using relative links, keep your file organization intact from desktop to server.If you are using a web editor like PageMill or HomePage, you aren't bothered with having to write elaborate links. However, if you organize image and text files in various folders by topic, you must preserve their locations relative to one another when moving them to the web server.(See example below) If your editor lets you choose between absolute and relative links, choose relative. Absolute links will often reference the addresses of files on your local machine where you did the work. Remember that a page with 3 images on it is really a collection of four connected files: the document and each of the three pictures.

Problem: I modified an old page and when I reposted it, disaster!
Solution:

• Well, that could mean many things, but one common occurence is when someone starts by capturing a page off the web and saves it on their hard drive as Text instead of Source using Netscape. This strips out all of the HTML formatting tags. This is most likely to happen to people using Navigator Gold as their editor- hours past their bedtime.

* Before moving on from one step to another, stop and ask yourself "Am I editing or browsing, and is the file online or on my hard drive?" If you can't answer the questions with confidence, stop and retrace your steps before hitting another save button or pulling down a menu item.

• 1. Your image file's name doesn't agree with the <img src> name in your document.

*Check the filename against the name in the tag.

• 2. The image isn't in the location the browser expected.

*Make sure the filepath in the document agrees with the images actual location

• 3. It's not saved in a web compatible format

* Save it as GIF or JPEG in your image editing software. Even though the filename ends in .GIF or .JPG, you may have actually forgotten to save the file in one of those formats in your image editor. Naming a PICT file "image.GIF" doesn't magically make it a GIF unless you selected that file format when you saved it!

• 4. When you uploaded it via ftp you sent it as Macbinary data or some other format.

* Upload images as RAW data when using Fetch or other ftp client.