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Preview - Local Publish - Remote Publish & Uploads
Preview (from within NOF) and Local Publish are not the same thing.
Preview will give you a guideline as to how your page may look when you publish it. Sometimes you may get very minor differences between the view you get with preview and the view you get from within internet explorer (a generic term for whatever internet browser you are using) but preview should give you a fairly good idea of the end result. You may also get minor variations between the different browsers.
Local Publish will create all or some of the pages and images for your web site and write them to your local hard drive. The files that NOF creates depend on whether you are doing a complete publish of the site or you are just publishing changes. These are created in a folder that you can probably find at something like
C:\Program Files\NetObjects\NetObjects Fusion 8\User Sites\yoursitename\Local Publish\
if you used the default settings to install NOF. These files will remain on your system until you delete them. I have no idea why you would unless your tidying up old projects or just doing a bit of housekeeping to regain some disk space.
This folder contains all of the generated code and images that NOF has produced. NOF should then fire up your internet explorer and load the home page of your site. You can explore most of the things you have done by navigating through your site in this way and checking to see if it is how you want it. Some functions you may have built into your site will not work this way as they are server side items and need to be on your hosting ISPs system to execute properly. You will soon see which ones they are because you might see small grey boxes or small segments of code (if you are using PHP for example) however you should be able to see sufficient of your site "locally" from your hard drive to see if it is the result you want and then you can take a view on uploading it to your ISPs server. All of this, at this exact moment of time, only lives on your hard drive because you have not uploaded to your ISP.
If you then make changes to your site, NOF will overwrite the contents of the Local Publish folder with the new files it creates. Again these only live on your local system until you upload them to your ISP. When the time comes to upload your site you can either use the built in function within NOF or you can use a third party FTP program. If you use a third party program then you would navigate to your local publish directory to select the files you will upload to your host. Nothing changes on your host until you have done the upload.
Some ISPs use server caching to try and improve the performance of their services. This means that frequently or recently requested pages are stored on the ISP server in a temporary location and presented to the surfer more quickly. This can also have the result of a designer making changes to the site and, when checking online with internet explorer to see if the upload has been successful, being presented with a previous (older) page which is still in the server cache. This obviously gives the impression that the changes have not been made and can cause a good deal of frustration.
Another cause of this sympton is that the local machine (your PC) has its internet explorer set to cache recent pages. In IE6 for example you would find the settings in the top menu at tools - internet Options - settings. If this is set to automatic then local caching can occur and give the same results. You could change this to check for newer versions on every visit to the page. Another way of forcing a new download from the ISP server is to place a ? at the end of the complete URL. This should, in most cases, force the local machine to question the ISP system and load a new instance of the page from the ISP. It doesn't negate server side caching.
If you close down explorer you can always revisit your "local" site by using windows explorer and navigating to your Local Publish folder and open your home page. Internet explorer will use the home page base location as a point of reference to load other pages from your local published site. Like this you can always view the latest instance of your site without the need to republish every time unless you make changes.
September 2005
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