Index Template not an text file

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 5:45 pm

After I edited my daily and index template, via the butch ftp, I went back to edit again and it says:
"Index template is not a text file, you must edit it another way."

Whats going on? Also I could not access the forum or the site admin all day because of password issues.

Thanks.

PS After all the editing, I did a full update and my website looks like a train wreck. Most of to the fact I havent uploaded all the images, but I have some how destroyed my comic archive. Only the 12th page is showing now. PLEASE PLEASE help me. I cannot access my templates now so I do not know what to do.

yokomolotov.comicgenesis.com

Post by **Mercury Hat** » Wed Mar 15, 2006 6:45 pm

It sounds like you're trying to edit your template through FTP. You'll have to download it to your computer, edit it there, then upload the new version over the old.

I'm not sure what would cause your dailytemplate to only load one comic, no matter the date. You could always start over with the default blank dailytemplate and build it up completely anew, though

.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Thu Mar 16, 2006 7:54 pm

Does anyone know How I can get my comics to show up again? Do I need to add the tags ***next day*** etc back?

Also, can any one please tell me the difference between the daily and index template when you are editing your html?

Do edit both for the site to stay consistant page by page?

Also, this is the ONLY pc I can get through to you guys with. If I use another one, it will not log me in the forums, and will not allow me to log into siteadmin8080.

I suggest this bug be worked out. This is the only forum I ve had trouble logging in at, I hear a lot of other members having the same problem.

thanks as always,
yoko

Black Sparrow · Post by **Black Sparrow** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 8:20 am

I've never known that bug, although Christwriter seems to be experiencing something similar. We may need to call one of the server admins in for that.

When linking images and comics, make sure they're correctly named. Stay away from capital letters and spaces, even in the jpg/gif tags. It won't link correctly if there's any difference in capitalization.

The Indextemplate is for your front page. The Dailytemplate is for every other comic page. I can't get to your archives to look at your Dailytemplate. Is it uploaded next to the Indextemplate? Is it html, not htm?

After that, try deleting all the comics and comic pages in your Public folder and reuploading the comics to Workspace.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:07 am

What I did was I used front page to construct my pages, then Cut and Paste the html from front page to my templates via the butch server thing.
I opened the daily template and index template, (using edit) and pasted all the html from the txt file I made using Front Page. (I made sure that the advertisements and the keenspace credit was on the page, but in hindsight I believe I may have deleted the ***next*** ***previous*** tags. this could be the reason I have no comics showing up. I am going to try to delete all comics and try again.

Also to clear this up, when you upload regular Images, you upload them into the Public image folder, correct? I had been uploading them into the workspace image folder. Could this have caused an error?

And is there any way you can copy and past generic template html here for me so I can correct what i have deleted? Now that I know you have to download the templates to edit them i want to start over to make sure I have everything correct.

Thank you for your undying patience,
yoko

Black Sparrow · Post by **Black Sparrow** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:19 am

The templates are available in the FAQs sticky. Here's the default Dailytemplate:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> 
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 
Transitional//EN" 
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en" 
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> 
<head><title>***comic_name*** - ***todays_date***</title> 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; 
charset=iso-8859-1" /> 
</head> 
<div class="keen_ad" style="display:inline;"> 
***advertisement*** 
</div> 
<div class="main"> 
<h1>***comic_name***</h1> 
<h2>by ***author***</h2> 
***todays_comics*** 
<br /> 
***first_day*** ***previous_day*** ***next_day*** ***last_day*** 
<br /> 
***comic_name*** is hosted on <a href="http://www.comicgenesis.com">ComicGenesis</a>, a free webhosting and site automation service for webcomics. 
</div> 
</body> 
</html>

In the future, I wouldn't suggest copy-pasting your indextemplate code onto your dailytemplate. oh well. Live and learn, right?

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 10:35 am

Thank you very much, youve been so polite and helpful. I will let you know how it turns out.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Fri Mar 17, 2006 2:53 pm

Okay, I have no idea how to fix this. I tried downloading the two templates but I cannot open them anywhere, not on notepad or Frontpage. The page is completely blank.

How can I reset the templates to the original? How do I upload the edited custom page over the new? I'm using SmartFTP and it will not let me directly upload anything into the Templates. I know Im missing something vital, and I appreciate all of your help.

Oualawouzou · Post by **Oualawouzou** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 6:42 am

Black Sparrow answered your question on where to find the code for the original templates.

How do I upload the edited custom page over the new? I'm using SmartFTP and it will not let me directly upload anything into the Templates.

There's a little terminology problem here, what you said doesn't make sense...

Here's how it should work:

1) Connect via SmartFTP, open your workspace directory, right-click on the templates and select "download".
2) Open the local version of the files. So close (or minimize) SmartFTP, start NotePad or your html editor (FrontPage, 1stPage, etc), select File---Open and open the files you have downloaded.
3) Edit them until you are happy with the results.
4) Start SmartFTP again, right-click in the workspace area (not on a particular file), select "upload" and upload the templates. When asked if you want to overwrite the old files, click "yes".

If you do exactly this, it should work. If it doesn't, tell us exactly at which point and what kind of error you get. From your posts, it's not clear weither or not you're still trying to edit stuff straight on the server instead of on your own comp.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:51 am

Sorry for the lack of sense in my previous post, you still somehow answered exactly what I needed to be cleared up. Thank you. I will try this and get back with you.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 6:33 pm

Okay. I did all the steps. I was told to "reset" the templates. I downloaded the index and daily templates. I opened them locally in Front Page, erased all HTML and pasted the original HTML from the FAQ sticky in each. I then went to step 4. It did not ask me if I wanted to rewrite old files though.
After all this I did a full page update.
this is what I got:
yokomolotov.comicgenesis.com
So you see my problem, I hope. I though I would need to reset back to the original HTML you guys made for me before I custom edited my site.
So I'm not to sure where to go next since now the site doesnt even appear to be functional.

Thanks for all of your help and patience.
-Yoko

Post by **Mercury Hat** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 7:15 pm

What did you use to edit this page? If it wasn't a plain text editor like notepad, I suggest copying the basic code which Black Sparrow pasted into this thread and pasting it into notepad, then editing and saving it there.

The problem here is that whatever you used to edit the page put in the code for the symbols as opposed to the symbols themselves:

Code: Select all

<head>

This is what's in your code instead of

Code: Select all

<head>

The result is that the symbols show up in your actual page since they can't be parsed as real code.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 8:02 pm

I used front page. So if I build the page with front page, is it always going to be broken like that? Even if I cut and paste and save on notepad before uploading?

PS

I think I figured it out, and everythings back to normal, Im gonna try customing it tommorrow! Thanks!

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 8:56 am

Now when I start SmartFTP to upload my comics and such, CG's server is denying my password. I haven't changed the password since the last time it has uploaded sucessfully. Any ideas?

[11:59:57] USER yokomolotov
[11:59:57] 331 User yokomolotov OK. Password required
[11:59:57] PASS (hidden)
[11:59:57] 530 Authentication failed, sorry
[11:59:57] Active Help: http://www.smartftp.com/support/kb/index.php/51
[11:59:57] Cannot login waiting to retry (30s).

Malediction · Post by **Malediction** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 9:14 am

That's because of this: http://forums.comicgenesis.com/viewtopic.php?t=72495

Everyone is having that problem as far as I'm aware.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 12:23 pm

After all that, I am still at a loss. According to the Keen Space Cadets manual, you are to upload all images into the public image folder, all webpages to the workspace webpage folder. I did this yet nothing seems to come up.

Also, In the keenspace cadet manual when editing templates it suggests:

<div class="main"> <h1>The Gear</h1> <h2>by The Space Wranglers</h2> <br /> <br />
The meat of your site. Any of you familiar with HTML, treat <div class="main"> as your BODY tag. This is where all your editing is done and where most of the changes take place.

I put all custom HTML there, and this is what I got:
yokomolotov.comicgenesis.com

Rkolter · Post by **Rkolter** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 12:35 pm

STOP. USING. FRONTPAGE.

It's been told to you a few times now in this thread. Here is what you need to do to (very most likely) fix your problem:

1) open NOTEPAD. Start - Run - notepad.exe

2) Copy the index template code from Gear to this file and call it indextemplate.html. Save it somewhere.

3) Copy the code from Gear for the daily template and call it dailytemplate.html. Save it somewhere.

4) Upload these two files, using ascii mode with SmartFTP, to your \workspace directory.

5) Make sure you have no other stray copies of indextemplate or dailytemplate anywhere. Particularly not in \workspace\webpages or \public_html (but leave index.html alone)

6) Do a manual update.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 7:42 pm

rkolter wrote:STOP. USING. FRONTPAGE.

It's been told to you a few times now in this thread. Here is what you need to do to (very most likely) fix your problem:

1) open NOTEPAD. Start - Run - notepad.exe

2) Copy the index template code from Gear to this file and call it indextemplate.html. Save it somewhere.

3) Copy the code from Gear for the daily template and call it dailytemplate.html. Save it somewhere.

4) Upload these two files, using ascii mode with SmartFTP, to your \workspace directory.

5) Make sure you have no other stray copies of indextemplate or dailytemplate anywhere. Particularly not in \workspace\webpages or \public_html (but leave index.html alone)

6) Do a manual update.

Honestly, I appreciate your help but there is no reason to be rude. I am not out to sound negative here but its not my fault this is the only place that will not support a webpage customed by front page. Front page is a commonly used program for webpage editing and I have never had a problem with it EVER before using this site.

I will, however try not using front page and see how it turns out.

Rkolter · Post by **Rkolter** » Tue Mar 21, 2006 8:45 pm

Yoko Molotov wrote:Honestly, I appreciate your help but there is no reason to be rude. I am not out to sound negative here but its not my fault this is the only place that will not support a webpage customed by front page. Front page is a commonly used program for webpage editing and I have never had a problem with it EVER before using this site.

I will, however try not using front page and see how it turns out.

Frontpage inserts a large number of codes into the document (ditto Microsoft Word when you save as html, dreamweaver, and other WYSIWYG editors). ComicGenesis uses an update utility that actually tries to read your template and build an index and web pages based on it. Thus obviously, having spurious tags and code in your page can play hell with the update utility. This is apparently the situation you are experiencing. It is a (fairly) common problem.

Comic Genesis is not the only location on the web that has trouble with frontpage created webpages. It's just the only one that you've encountered. Honestly, if you want real control over your site, you want to use a simple text editor anyway.

I put the words in big, red, bold letters because more than one person has told you to use notepad, and you have continued to use frontpage. I did not do it to be rude, but to catch your attention. You'll actually find that I'm one of the more civil people here.

... in any case, the bold red letters got your attention and so really, regardless of you think it was rude of me or not, you have to admit that the ploy achieved its goal. I hope the notepad fix works for you. I'm really betting that it will.

Yoko Molotov · Post by **Yoko Molotov** » Wed Mar 22, 2006 8:03 am

Cool, sorry I misunderstood. ^-^