Trouble With Making It Work [Archive]

Erika

09-11-2006, 08:57 PM

Hi, i'm new to the board and fairly new with html so please bear with me while i ask some really basic questions. I hope that you are willing to take me by the hand and help me in a few areas that probably seem very obvious to most of you.

I just found this site by seeing it mentioned in the source code of someone's website and feel that I hit the jackpot! I love it!

So, I started by wanted to put something on my website, like "Nudging Text" I followed the instructions, which were pretty simple and it didn't show up. By the way, I use frontpage 2003 and I did go to code view and entered it where I wanted it on the page. But, nothing showed up.

So, I tried "Flying Letters" and although the words showed up, they didn't fly, in preview. They were just sitting there like all the other letters on the page. I even published the page to see if I just needed to do that but it didn't work either.

I, Also, tried, another one: Dropping Text Script. I followed the instructions and I don't remember what happened. I do remember, though, that I was confused by the instructions to "add the following into the <body> tag itself, like this: <body onload="dynAnimation8()">

My body line looks like this: <body background="back-357.gif" link="#000080" vlink="#808080" alink="#FF0000"> and I wasn't sure if I was supposed to put the above example into the brackets and if so which place or after the brackets.

There, now i've exposed my ignorance, but I can't learn anything without doing so. I guess I can feel some comfort knowing that I'm hidden behind my computer.

I would like to understand the simpler stuff becuase I plan to take advantage of the slideshows, like either the book flip slideshow or conveyor belt slide show, or maybe even the Presentational Slide Show for some affiliate links, in addition to the drop-menu codes. One step at a time, though!

Thanks for your help ahead of time.

jscheuer1

09-12-2006, 02:37 AM

First of all, FrontPage isn't the best choice of an editor for inserting javascript into a page. Even if you do everything right, sometimes FP will simply mangle the code for you, thank you very much. :mad: Anyways, the best tool for inserting scripts is a text editor. Notepad will do but, if you are going to get serious about this, a context highlighting editor like Vim or Edit Pad Pro will be a great help as these editors automatically color the text so that you can see more clearly what it is that you are writing. Notepad is fine to start out with.

Once you have your script inserted in your page though, if you edit it with FP again, it could mess it up. At the end of this post I will include information on how to avoid that. As for your question on the body tag. If the script demo page says to do this:

<body onload="dynAnimation8()">

That just means to include that in your body tag. Using your example tag:

<body onload="dynAnimation8()" background="back-357.gif" link="#000080" vlink="#808080" alink="#FF0000">

The onload event in the body tag is treated very much like any other attribute.

What I recommend in all cases like this, is to get your page looking like you want using FP but without any scripts. Save a copy of that somewhere to work on later if the need arises. Next open the page in notepad or simple text and add the scripts in according to the installation instructions, including any customization you've added. Never load this version of the page into FP ever again. To preview it locally, use the browser. To upload it, use FTP (preferred) or your host's online uploading tool.

Here is another solution I ran across* but, since I do not use FP, I haven't tested it:

In a text editor open the page whose code you wish to preserve.

At the beginning of the section of code you wish to prevent FrontPage from modifying, add the following line of code:



At the end of the code section, add the following line of code:



Save the changes to the file. The next time the file is opened in FrontPage, FrontPage will not attempt to alter the code between the two HTMLMarkup tags.

*Posted in these forums by usace-lrc and perhaps others.