Harness the Power of FrontPage 98

Useful Components

FrontPage stands apart from other programs in its ability to save you time when adding small applications--called components or bots--to your pages. The Personal Web Server that ships with FrontPage includes the extensions, so you can view your bots at work on your hard drive. If you upload your files to a Web server, check with your provider to find out if it supports FrontPage extensions; otherwise the components won't work.

FrontPage bots (like search engines and discussion boards) are powerful tools. They can be used for good ... or for evil. Choose wisely!

Search and Destroy

Adding a search engine to your site is wildly simple. To create a new search page, choose New, Search Page from FrontPage Explorer and click OK. To create a search form on an existing page, open the page from FrontPage Explorer, place the cursor where you want the form to appear, and choose Insert, Active Elements, Search Form. Click OK.

To check out your search engine, click the Preview tab at the bottom of the FrontPage Editor. The search works in Preview mode, so you can test it without launching an external browser.

Note: To preview any bot, including a search form, you must have Personal Web Server running. From the Start menu, select Settings, Control Panel and then double-click the Personal Web Server icon. A dialog box showing the server properties appears. Click the Startup tab and then click the Start button under Web Server State. Click OK to fire up the server.

All the News That Fits

Say you have several people in your office who want to author pages for your site. With a free download, you can create a simple publishing tool that allows them to add content to your site through their browsers. When a user submits news, it gets posted automatically to your site. You can even have e-mail sent to you when someone posts.

Download Microsoft's Auto-Updating News Page Module from FileWorld. The file includes all the HTML documents you'll need, plus a Microsoft Word document called "Installing the News Module.doc," which provides information on installing and customizing the component. I'll give you the basics here.

Double-click the file to unzip it (you'll need a zip utility such as WinZip to expand the file). Inside, you'll find a folder called News Module; within News Module is another folder called News. Extract the News folder and then open FrontPage Explorer and drag it into your FrontPage Web page.

Once you've dropped the folder into the page, you're ready to go. Users submit items via the submit.htm page and read their posts on news.htm.

All Fired Up and No Place to Go

If your Web service provider doesn't support the FrontPage extensions, you have another option--and it's free.

Tripod offers 11MB of free space, with support for the FrontPage server extensions. The downside? You'll get pop-up advertisements on your site. If you can live with this inconvenience, check out Tripod