personal web sharing woes - troubleshooting?

[anu]

I don't know where to post this, my apologies if this is not the right place:

I am using a G4, OSXJaguar, 512 MB ram and about 100gb space available on the hard drives.

I am learning to make websites, and use personal web sharing to send links to others to view progress on the site. Up until a few weeks ago, it was a GREAT system, worked just fine.

Several things have been happening all around the same time, don't know if they are related;
-since getting a new IP address after turning off the computer overnight once, no one can see the web pages. Some get "not displayed" messages, others get background only, no text or images.(don't know if new IP caused this or not - I have adjusted the link already) I can see the pages on Rendezvous OK.
-get "insufficient memory available" messages in Dreamweaver, Photoshop and occasionally IE can't display an image
-email suddenly will not accept attachments on any computer in the house using yahoo or Entourage or Outlook, unless they are zipped first.
- cannot upload html files to servers. Dreamweaver tries three times, then says "server not responding" . Images seem to go OK. Cannot use upload function on free hosting sites, where it used to work before. It cannot be a coincidence that every single hosting company's upload function is not working! There must be something strange going on in my computer,...

I have emailed our ISP, no response yet after 2 days. They (Rogers in Canada) are changing their email to partner with yahoo for better spam protection among other things. I checked with my neighbour, her email works fine with the same ISP.
I uninstalled Norton Antivirus, no difference.

Any ideas? I just downloaded 'cocktail' to optimize OSx performance, haven't got a memory message YET, but makes no difference with uploading. I am just learning about computers, don't have much intuition about where to look to fix things.

Any help most appreciated!

 

[symphonix]

Looks like you've got a handful of different issues going on here.
Firstly, have you set the IP address or anything like that in DreamWeaver? Or have you inserted the images by IP address?
Have you tried checking the code for your site? If you're HTML code-reading isn't great, just look for IP addresses anywhere in your code. Ideally, there shouldn't be any.

- In DreamWeaver, PhotoShop and MSIE, are you bringing everything in from your local hard disk, or are you pointing to network addresses?

- As for the ISP's change to partner with Yahoo, this is almost certainly responsible for the change in attachments. I would address this issue ONLY to your ISP. Best only give them one issue at a time.

- As for upload to free hosting sites, have you changed anything in your firewall, or your network configuration? Try turning the Mac OS X firewall off to see if that is a factor. If none of these helps, refer it to your ISP yet again.

BTW: Cocktail is handy and will handle a few nifty maintenance tasks, but is not likely to make any real difference to ANY of the items you describe here.

 

[anu]

Looks like you've got a handful of different issues going on here.
Firstly, have you set the IP address or anything like that in DreamWeaver? Or have you inserted the images by IP address?

Thanks for responding, symphonix!

For viewing the site (made in Dreamweaver) but using personal web sharing, I don't define a remote location. The site is only local. So to view it, I use Safari, type in the path from my on-computer personal web page, and substitute the computer's IP address for the "anu's-computer-local." space. That link works for outside viewers. Essentially I am using my computer as the testing server.

Have you tried checking the code for your site? If you're HTML code-reading isn't great, just look for IP addresses anywhere in your code. Ideally, there shouldn't be any.
Yes I do understand the code, and no, there is no IP address inserted in it. As I say, the system worked very well for a year and a half before all this. I am stymied!

- In DreamWeaver, PhotoShop and MSIE, are you bringing everything in from your local hard disk, or are you pointing to network addresses?

I am just working on my local hard drive. In desperation, since my local websharing was not working, I tried to upload the sites to free hosting sites, one painstaking file at a time, with the free uploading utilities. Even if the host supplied mulitple file uploading utilities, I could ONLY do one at a time. So on the free hosting sites, I was not using Dreamweaver's FTP at all.
In MSIE, I was getting the message when I tried to view pages 1.) by pasting the link with my IP into Explorer, or 2.) using the path assigned by the free hosting service to view what fragments of the html pages did upload. The message referred to being unable to display this (optimized) image because of insufficient memory.

- As for the ISP's change to partner with Yahoo, this is almost certainly responsible for the change in attachments. I would address this issue ONLY to your ISP. Best only give them one issue at a time.

Thanks for the tip. That may be why I haven't heard back. I mention all the problems in case one affects the other - I don't know enough about computers to differentiate,...

- As for upload to free hosting sites, have you changed anything in your firewall, or your network configuration? Try turning the Mac OS X firewall off to see if that is a factor. If none of these helps, refer it to your ISP yet again.

Never had the firewall on in the first place.

BTW: Cocktail is handy and will handle a few nifty maintenance tasks, but is not likely to make any real difference to ANY of the items you describe here.
Ok. Hmm I did it because of the memory messages - I have been negligent in doing any sort of "optimizing performance" kinds of maintenance. I gather with OSX you don't need to defrag.

Thanks for tackling such a complex tangle!

anu

 

[symphonix]

Hi again Anu.

It sounds like the browsers that are having the trouble are running into problems resolving the "anu's-computer-local" address. Try ripping any references to it out of your code, you should be able to create the site without any such references.
Probably, the clients are trying to resolve an image on the "anu's-computer-local" address instead of just asking the server they are connected to for the image. This will probably also be the problem with viewing the sites on free servers, because the browser will be getting some files from the free server, some files may come from your machine, and some might not be found at all! Clean these refs out of your site code and you should be OK.

Also, try using IP address or something else to connect from the client computers, to see if it makes a difference.

Yes, with MacOSX there is no need to defrag. There is very little maintenance work to do, and practically nothing that must be done. Cocktail will help you with these tasks.