FrontPage Components are part of the "value-added" aspect of
FrontPage, making life for Web designers easier by saving time and trouble. They simplify
tasks that would otherwise be complicated and time-consuming, such as adding a hit counter
or search engine to your web site.
Following are descriptions of the most useful and most used FP Components.
Comment
Comments are sections of text that are embedded in your page, but will not be seen when the page is viewed with a browser. You will see them when you open the page in the FP Editor.
To place a comment on your page, click the "Insert FrontPage Component" icon (looks like a little robot) and select "Comment." Type the text of your comment into the box then click OK.
Your comment will appear as colored text, and you will notice that when you move the mouse across the comment text, it changes shape to the robot icon. This is because you cannot edit the comment text directly on the editor screen. To edit it, right-click on the comment text and select "Comment Properties…" from the pop-up menu.
Hit Counter
Hit counters are commonly used on Web pages to track the number of times the page has been accessed. Before placing a hit counter on your page, it is important to understand the following concepts:
Hit counters can be misleading. A hit counter reflects the number of times the page has been accessed, NOT the number of individual visitors to the site. The difference is lies in the fact that one visitor may "reload" the page in their browser several times in one visit, incrementing the counter each time. This is especially true when the visitor is the page creator -- who may be making changes to the page and reviewing them in the browser after each time he/she saves the page. This inflates the number and makes it appear that more visitors have looked at the site than really have.
If your goal is to collect valid statistics about who is hitting your site and how often, then a counter is not the answer. The Web server keeps a log of all requests for pages. We provide software for analyzing the log to see a breakdown of the hit statistics for your site. This tool is located at:
http://outreach.missouri.edu/stats.html
The rule of thumb is: hit counters should be used for entertainment purposes only, not as a statistically accurate measure.
That
being said, here's how to insert a hit counter:
The counter will appear as text until you save the page out to the server and look at it with your browser.
Note -- this feature will only work with pages, which are saved on a server equipped with the FrontPage 98 Extensions (it won't work if you just look at the page when saved on your hard drive.)
Example: people have visited this page. (Btw, I started this out at
10,000)
This is possibly the most useful Component. It includes one Web document into another one; sort of like that way an image is included into a web page. An image is a separate file, either a .GIF or .JPG, but it appears in your Web page. Similarly, you can include one Web page into another one using this Component.
The most common application for this is a footer file. If you have a footer section that will appear on all of your Web pages, you can create a separate page containing only that footer, call it footer.html for example, and then include that page on all your other Web pages. Then, if you need to modify the contents of the footer, you only have to modify footer.html, and then it will be automatically modified on each page which "includes" that footer file.
Any time you have sections that are duplicated on a number of Web pages, it might be a good time to use an Include.
To include a footer file on your page:
- Place your cursor on the page where you want the included file to appear.
- Click the robot icon on the toolbar.
- Choose "Include Page."
- Click "browse" to look for the file you want -- footer.html. Highlight the filename.
- Click OK.
The file will appear in your page. You can drag and drop it to any location on the page.
Notice that when you move your mouse over the included section, it changes shape to the robot icon. You cannot edit the included section here; you have to open the original file to make changes (in this case, footer.html).
Timestamp
A feature often used in conjunction with an included page is a timestamp. This will insert a date and time into your page, and automatically update it every time you edit your page.
If you put a timestamp into an included footer, when the page is viewed, the timestamp will reflect the date that the main page was last edited, not the date the footer was edited.
- Move your cursor to the point in the page where you want the timestamp to appear.
- Click INSERT à TIMESTAMP
- Choose the date and time format
- Click OK.
You can drag and drop this around the page. You cannot edit the text of the timestamp, but you CAN change the font, size and color of the text.
Example: This page last edited on: August 27, 2002 01:25 PM
