FrontPage unlinked Files

[spinningjennie]

FrontPage Reports view tells me I have many unlinked files. I think this means that those pages can’t be reached from any other page. However I have the same navigation bar on each page via Shared Borders & these links do work, so is the Unlinked Files report accurate?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Gnosisless]

If there are any issues with the "linked pages" report not working correctly, I'm not aware of them....
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If the navigation bar on a certain page points to Home, Back, Next, Up, let's say, but there is no link DOWN to that page, you'll get that message that the page is unlinked.
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In Page View, click one of the pages reported as unlinked and then click the Hyperlinks view in the left panel. See if there's an arrow going TO the page, as well as arrows coming from the page.
<p>
It's possible you have linked to the page via a script or applet that isn't recognized by the link parser, but the most likely occurence is that you have linked from the page, but not to it.
<p>
I know this is a pretty generalized suggestion; hope it helps!!

 

[spinningjennie]

Thankyou Gnosisless for your detailed advice re. FrontPage unlinked files. My apologies for the delay in replying. You helped confirm my understanding of unlinked files, & explained how to check them.

Unfortunately, ALL FILES IN THE WEB are still reported as unlinked despite:

1. the fact that all my supposedly unlinked files (as reported in Reports view) have arrows going TO them (and FROM them) in Hyperlinks view and

2. the fact that I CAN successfully link back to the home page by clicking either one link or two links in sequence when I go to the Preview tab in Page view.

I’ve tried:
having the web pages with and without shared borders (which contain the navigation links), but still the unlinked files remain.

‘Tis a mystery! but thanks very much for trying!

 

[Gnosisless]

One thing I just discovered myself is that links where you have absolute references instead of relative ones will appear as unlinked files.

For example, if your link says either http://mysite.myserver.com/page.html or
file:C:///webdirectory/websubdirectory/page.html

the page will cause an unlinked reference in the reports section. This former situation won't cause a problem as long as you're publishing to the same site every time, but if you tried to publish to another site, the links would still point to mysite.myserver.com. The latter will point to the files on your hard drive.

I discovered that even if you open a link that is listed as http://mysite.myserver.com/page.html and delete out the URL up to the file name, FrontPage will still sometimes treat the link as an absolute hyperlink, especially if you copy and paste that button somewhere else (and I imagine this would apply to shared borders as well).

The solution is this: in Hyperlink properties, when you are selecting the page to link the object (button, link, text, whatever) to, click in the WINDOW where your current pages are already listed instead of using the Web or File buttons to browse to a page, or typing/editing in the page name manually. For whatever reason, FrontPage treats anything manually typed or browsed to anywhere other than the window as an absolute link. I've attached a jpg of what I mean, in case my explanation falls short .

If the page is properly linked as relative, it will show up in the hyperlink properties as JUST the page name, or a subdirectory (like "images/mypicture.jpg") and NOT as an "http" or "file". reference.

I went round and round trying to figure this out in a website I was editing for someone else, and it finally clicked for me. Hope this is what's causing your problem and it helps.

Good luck!

 

[Gnosisless]

By the way, if you are linking to a page not yet created, I *think* clicking on the "new page" icon in the file line works okay and it's treated as relative.

 

[spinningjennie]

Thankyou again Gnosisless for giving me your discoveries on absolute and relative links, which will help me when I do publish. However, I haven’t published any sites yet.

METHOD I USED:
I HAVE used the exact method you clearly described to select the page I want to link to. But Reports View still links ALL pages as UNLINKED. I didn’t manually type the linked page. I just chose INSERT, HYPERLINK, then chose the page to link to from the CREATE HYPERLINK WINDOW.

Thanks so much for your ideas.