August 18, 1997
DR. WEBSITE: How Webmasters Can Publish A Site Simultaneously From Two Separate Locations
Dear Dr. Website®: My brother and I have a Web design business and we have run into a small problem. He lives a few miles away from me, we both have our own computers, and we use another business to host the Web pages that we build.By David Fiedler and Scott Clark
The problem: How can we both work on one Web site from each of our own computers? If I publish the site from my computer to the host, he will then have to download the site to his computer, and then publish from his computer--and then I will have to download the site to my computer. What do you think is the best option?
The Aug. 4 Dr. Website column described a program called NetLoad that enables users to mirror an entire Web site on a Windows 95-based machine and simply update the changed files back to the server.
However, there is an entirely different solution that might work better in your case, and it's even free. Cyberteams Inc. has released a product called WebSite Director Lite that lets you work on a site in conjunction with someone else on your team--from any browser on any platform. It locks a file to prevent two people from editing it at the same time, and lets you edit within your browser, or in a separate program, if you like.
Sounding Off in Javascript
Dear Dr. Website®: I have recently added an imagemap to my home pages. To speed download time, I got rid of the Java click buttons to which I had added sound. I liked the feature of adding sound to the link buttons. Is there a way to add sound to each of the links in an imagemap?
By embedding the sound within the page using the hidden parameter, you can use JavaScript to call a function that plays the sound. It works invisibly, and as long as you keep the sounds small, it's very slick. Here's a look at the script:
<body> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript"> <!--// function playnoise(){ document.sound.play(false); } //--> </SCRIPT> <EMBED SRC="/old?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwebdeveloper.com%2Fdrweb%2Fdoh.wav&y=1999" HIDDEN =TRUE CONTROLS=console VOLUME =100 LOOP=FALSE AUTOSTART=FALSE NAME="sound" MASTERSOUND> <BR><BR> <AREA SHAPE=CIRCLE COORDS ="192,93,16" HREF="javascript: onClick=playnoise()"> </body>ClarificationAs several sharp-eyed readers have pointed out, the Aug. 4 column incorrectly stated that MIME types had to be changed on a server to display a proprietary document type correctly in a Web browser.
While this would be true for a Web server, the particular case being discussed involved an FTP server, which has no concept of MIME types and only knows about text and binary files. In such a case, it's the browser that decides how to display a file.
The easiest way to force a properly configured browser to display a file in a way you can predict, therefore, is to make sure it's accessing a properly configured Web server rather than an FTP server.
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Keywords: html, design
Date: 19970818