Website all back to normal. I tried installing Frontpage Server Extensions last week, and had difficulty. To the uninitiated, FSE are some files that Microsoft Frontpage uses to interact with your web server. Once installed, you can edit your website live using Frontpage, just like editing a Word document. However, the server extensions can screw with a bunch of files. Specifically, your .htaccess files which control who gets to see what when they type in a web address.

So, I had to make a questionaire for my wife. She’s taking a course at Uni where her and a group of others need to poll a large group of students regarding their views of the student colleges at York University. She figured the best way would be to do something online, so I got to work. My boss set me up with Frontpage and away I went. Last week, as I said, I installed the FSE, but I couldn’t get them to install in the subdomain where I wanted to store Maija’s research stuff. After a supposedly fruitless call to my server’s tech support, I left it for a week. I thought it was fruitless because I was never contacted about the problem, when I was told that I was. However, they did resolve the problem, as I learned tonight.

So, to get things working I uninstalled the server extension’s that I had done so far, and reinstalled them. This was when my site went all bust. It took a bit to figure out that the .htaccess files were the culprits. Once I figured that out, I returned them to their old state. That fixed my site, but stopped Frontpage from working. So, a little more playing and I finally had them both working.

Now my wife has a finished survey that dumps into a spreadsheet, I have a working-like-normal website and more knowledge and experience than before. Everybody wins!