Problem with displaying web pages correctly

Problems with the Windows version of XAMPP, questions, comments, and anything related.

Problem with displaying web pages correctly

Postby grutz » 07. August 2006 06:15

Trying to setup our local school's web site to run on a winxp machine. We can access the web site ok but most pages have errors. The top of the page is ok, but part way down it reverts to unreadable characters. Can anyone help please. I'm a real newbie (xampp virgin) so please give simple instructions if possible.

Thanks in advance
grutz
 
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Re: Problem with displaying web pages correctly

Postby Izzy » 07. August 2006 07:51

grutz wrote:Trying to setup our local school's web site to run on a winxp machine. We can access the web site ok but most pages have errors. The top of the page is ok, but part way down it reverts to unreadable characters. Can anyone help please. I'm a real newbie (xampp virgin) so please give simple instructions if possible.

Thanks in advance
More details please as your question is vague.

What do the characters look like?

Paste the html/errors here perhaps or even a link so I can take a look see.

If you can access your web site OK then the server would seem to be OK also.

Might be the code/html in your pages but without much to go on I can only guess. ;)
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Postby grutz » 07. August 2006 08:41

Thanks for the quick reply. I've bought the web server home to work on this problem but it can not be accessed via the internet now as it will take 24hrs to populate the new ip address. Hopefully in 16hrs time you will be able to access it, the url is www.levin.school.nz

I've taken a screen dump of one of the pages...it's a jpg file. Can an image be attached to this reply. I see you can insert an image, but it looks like it has to be from a web site, not a file from my computer.
Thanks again for your help
Last edited by grutz on 07. August 2006 09:09, edited 1 time in total.
grutz
 
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Postby Izzy » 07. August 2006 09:02

Take my advice and remove your email address from the post. Use the edit button. I will give you a link you can upload the file and post the image link here. You will be flooded with spam if you leave your email address here. Also remember not to post your email to any public accessible forum, it spells S-P-A-M. ;)

Upload your image here it will then give you a number of links back to your image - then post that link here:

http://imageshack.us/

Good luck :)
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Postby grutz » 07. August 2006 09:14

Image
grutz
 
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Postby grutz » 07. August 2006 09:19

BTW, the web site looked perfect before moving it to the new web server. Also if I access it from the server, ie find it and open it in ntsdoc, it comes up perfect but not when you access it from the internet. The web site has frames and maybe the lines are too long for the frame, what do you think.

shoota
grutz
 
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Postby Izzy » 07. August 2006 09:39

It looks like a binary file.

Is it a MS Word document?
Did you use Word to publish the web site or page?

A server on a commercial hosting environment has FrontPage Extensions as a choice or are turned on by default.

XAMPP does not have FrontPage Extensions as a choice which would render a MS Doc file.

This from the FAQ:
Where is a the front page extension?
We do not know a free extension for the Apache under win32.

Try converting the doc file to a text file or use FrontPage Editor then you can html code it to give it the look you want. It will then be acceptable on just about any web server and be viewable in any web browser not just IE.

Until I can see the full html source file I can not offer any other explanation.

Just to add if you are using Word then use a Google search and "convert doc to html" as the key words and you will see returned some useful pages.
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Postby grutz » 08. August 2006 02:07

Yes we are using word and I hope this isn't the problem. Our originally instructions was to design a web site where the school could use word to create their web pages. The school wanted everything to be very simple. I had a program written in visual basic that converted word documents into html and also updated to our server. Sometime later the school went to a new isp provider and our upload tool couldn't work with their system. The school wasn't prepared to pay to have it altered...(schools don't have big budgets here) Uploading their web site is now more complicated so they are using an old retired computer to run their web site at the school. Therefore the tool we originally wrote will work again. This is the reason why I looked around for a free web server software. However I'm not convinced that it is a problem just solely to do with word as when I was testing xampp I used my personal site and got a similar problem. My personal site was created in front page. I'll put my server offline and use the xampp and do some more experimenting.
grutz
 
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Postby grutz » 08. August 2006 02:56

Thanks Izzy. I'm fairly sure you are correct about word. But it is a combination of two factors, word and WinXP. Most word created htm files had problems but everything in dreamweaver worked OK. However once I installed SP2 the problem is fixed. Word created html are working fine now...fingers r x'ed.

Also signed the whale partition..."Shoota Ballinger NZ".

What is the lovely peaceful music on that site.

Thanks very much for your help, really appreciated.
grutz
 
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Postby Izzy » 08. August 2006 03:18

You can educate the students to save their creations in Word as HTML files.
You can set your browser to not use cached pages when you are in the process of development as the browser cache is your worst enemy at this time.

Your link above, to your site, is now active from the Internet and apart from a few instances of Word/Frontpage proprietory code I could not see any issues with the html. In IE the code tried to start my Frontpage Editor which of course I denied it but the page rendered just like the rest.

I have been through all the menu items in the left frame without any problems at all except the Newsletter item gave a 404 page not found error

I assume from the error messages I induced that you are serving the above site from XAMPP.

Here is a capture of what I see. I see the same identical screen rendered in 4 different browsers. So no problem there if what you see in the capture is what you intended on the Home page.

Image

Hope this has been of help

Kia ora
Off topic but on the welcome/home page perhaps a Mouri welcome message in Te Reo Māori might be appropriate as it seems to be a Mouri dominent school, though I might be wrong there.
Hei konā rā

Good luck :)

EDIT
You posted whilst I was composing my reply. I am pleased that you have resolved this annoying problem. :D

Please ask all your friends and their friends and so on to sign the petition as we need this 1 million sigs to present to have the best effect we can.
The music is part of the swf game file. I will investigate and try and locate its name from the author.
Cheers.

Ok the author wants it to remain anon but I have the original mp3 file that I have named whales.mp3 and you can download it from here:
http://rapidshare.de/files/28586577/whales.mp3.html
Click on Free then next page just follow the instructions. Too easy. ;)
EDIT/
Izzy
 
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Postby grutz » 08. August 2006 05:25

Downloaded the music. Had hoped it was off a CD I could buy or something. Still it's worth just opening the web site and have the music running in the back ground ;)

I'm thinking of using xampp myself. Is it user friendly to set up more than web site hosting? I read in one of your other posts that you recommend reading on the subject. I don't have a lot of time to read up on it so just asking for your support to quickly point me in the right direction. I hope this isn't asking to much from you.

shoota
grutz
 
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Postby Izzy » 08. August 2006 05:38

Any web site of XAMPP's component parts will give in depth reading but bear in mind XAMPP is a *nix server environment ported to Windows. So some of the available info might be somewhat different in XAMPP but will give a general idea and seed your imagination. ;)

However if you get stuck by all means use these forums, someone will be more than happy to help you.

Good luck with it. :)
Last edited by Izzy on 28. September 2006 04:00, edited 3 times in total.
Izzy
 
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Postby sari42 » 08. August 2006 13:04

hi,
it looks like the new webserver has (zlib)compression 'on' by default.
if your script also tries to compress without checking this fact before,
you often get such garbled output.
(only a hint to in which direction to seek)
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