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Tales of Tech Support 2
Apr. 27th, 2005 02:34 pmThere's a gentleman I have been dealing with for days who is having problems with his FrontPage site. It is slow, he complains, and he keeps getting disconnected.
I had the extensions on his site reinstalled. FrontPage is pretty complex, and the extensions can get corrupted. It's not uncommon at all, I would say I handle five such problems a week.
However, this didn't work for him. I walked him through a very long, involved procedure in order to get the extensions reinstalled on his own computer. Now, he has already shown me he's not very tech savvy, so I have him uninstall everything and reinstall it after cleaning out because I can already see he isn't going to "get" how to just do the extensions.
See, if the extensions on your machine get corrupted, it can be like a case of the clap--you fix the server, the user tries to connect and recorrupts the extensions because of their extensions, they get cleaned up and try to connect and the server extensions corrupt their extensions... you have to treat both partners. ;)
I believe this might be the case, so we reinstall the extensions on the server at the same time he's fixing his problem.
A day passes without hearing from him and I dare allow myself to hope that it worked.
Then I get another mail. Same problem, he says, and whines how FrontPage is supposed to be so easy and blah blah blah blah.
Okay. I log into his site with my own copy of FrontPage and commence to downloading his site. It's BIG. Our current limit for this particular hosting package is, I believe, 1.5 gigs, and he's way into it. It is slow, no doubt, but it chugs along steadily.
I do get disconnected several times, but when I re-log into the site to resume downloading, it picks up where it left off, no problem. I begin to wonder if he is simply too impatient.
I do some web crawling, and one thing I do find is mention of a similar problem with other, large web sites. An idea starts to form.
You see, FrontPage is more than just an editor/uploader. It's practically its own content management system. It checks in pages, scans for bad links and does all sorts of fun extra stuff.
So maybe this is the real problem. When he has thousands of files and some of them are very large, maybe the delay is in part just because of the other processes FrontPage runs on each new file. If that's the case, all he need do is be patient.
I write him and say this, letting him know this seems to be just a limitation inherent in the program, and suggest he just try letting it upload. I also tell him to make sure that his settings are "publish changed pages only" so that he doesn't have to re-do the whole site every time he wants to update a single page.
He writes back today and says "I fixed some messed up pages and a bunch of broken links, did what you said and let it just take as long as it took, and it's moving SO much faster now! But... 1.5 gigs seems awfully small for a website. What happens when I add more files?"
Another tact award for me today. I don't say to him "Well, as a general rule, a person running a site as large and busy as yours doesn't use FrontPage, they learn to code."
I said "By that time, I'm sure FrontPage will be out with an update."
*snerk*
I had the extensions on his site reinstalled. FrontPage is pretty complex, and the extensions can get corrupted. It's not uncommon at all, I would say I handle five such problems a week.
However, this didn't work for him. I walked him through a very long, involved procedure in order to get the extensions reinstalled on his own computer. Now, he has already shown me he's not very tech savvy, so I have him uninstall everything and reinstall it after cleaning out because I can already see he isn't going to "get" how to just do the extensions.
See, if the extensions on your machine get corrupted, it can be like a case of the clap--you fix the server, the user tries to connect and recorrupts the extensions because of their extensions, they get cleaned up and try to connect and the server extensions corrupt their extensions... you have to treat both partners. ;)
I believe this might be the case, so we reinstall the extensions on the server at the same time he's fixing his problem.
A day passes without hearing from him and I dare allow myself to hope that it worked.
Then I get another mail. Same problem, he says, and whines how FrontPage is supposed to be so easy and blah blah blah blah.
Okay. I log into his site with my own copy of FrontPage and commence to downloading his site. It's BIG. Our current limit for this particular hosting package is, I believe, 1.5 gigs, and he's way into it. It is slow, no doubt, but it chugs along steadily.
I do get disconnected several times, but when I re-log into the site to resume downloading, it picks up where it left off, no problem. I begin to wonder if he is simply too impatient.
I do some web crawling, and one thing I do find is mention of a similar problem with other, large web sites. An idea starts to form.
You see, FrontPage is more than just an editor/uploader. It's practically its own content management system. It checks in pages, scans for bad links and does all sorts of fun extra stuff.
So maybe this is the real problem. When he has thousands of files and some of them are very large, maybe the delay is in part just because of the other processes FrontPage runs on each new file. If that's the case, all he need do is be patient.
I write him and say this, letting him know this seems to be just a limitation inherent in the program, and suggest he just try letting it upload. I also tell him to make sure that his settings are "publish changed pages only" so that he doesn't have to re-do the whole site every time he wants to update a single page.
He writes back today and says "I fixed some messed up pages and a bunch of broken links, did what you said and let it just take as long as it took, and it's moving SO much faster now! But... 1.5 gigs seems awfully small for a website. What happens when I add more files?"
Another tact award for me today. I don't say to him "Well, as a general rule, a person running a site as large and busy as yours doesn't use FrontPage, they learn to code."
I said "By that time, I'm sure FrontPage will be out with an update."
*snerk*
