What is the best way to use FrontPage on two machines?

[yaelede]

I've been using FP2003 for years for my sites.I have a small office, but I'm doing web site design and programming mainly at my home computer.
I was always facing the problem of using FP on both place, and there occured other problems too.
For example FP uses the "full computer name" to determine the status of changed pages when publishing. Years ago I tried to do the following:
- I made some changes at home, all sites resided on a portable HD. Then I took it to my office, and I loaded the web sites from there into FP. Then, after a few publishing, I had to realize, that FP mixed up the whole site, because it saw two authors (i.e. two different "full computer name"s). I was pulling out my hair..

Now I see the opportunity to solve this problem by reinstalling Windows in my office AND during installation I set exactly the same computer name as with my home computer. That seems to be a solution.
However, what can I do if I don't want to carry the HD with me? It's not too comfortable, and it could be easily damaged.
Is there any other good solution to this?
How do you handle this?
I can't imagine, that there are no better solution on this..

I would appreciate you inputs.

Y

[Corey Bryant]

What version of Frontpage do you have? Frontpage 2003 offers synchronization.

We have one website that my business partner also makes changes to. He usually just signs into the website live and makes changes there.

You can sign into the website live and choose to publish to your local computer. Then close that one and open the one locally. Make changes & publish.

Now go to the other computer - open the site live and publish to your local computer. Then close that one and open the one locally. Make changes & publish.

As long as you remember to do this - it is pretty simple.

-Corey

[yaelede]

I use FP 2003, and I was playing with the idea of using the "Synchronize" function...though I never dared to do it..
Does it differ from the method you described? (it really depends on your memory..)
:-)

[Corey Bryant]

Hitting the sync feature basically will sync the files between your local computer and the server.

I use it everything I edit the website that my business partner changes. Frontpage looks at all the dates and if the date is later than the one on the local computer, it publishes it to my computer.

And then I can make changes and then either publish or sync. The synchronization feature seems to be the best tool for you.

-Corey

[gabby]

I am using FrontPage 2002. Does it have the sync feature also? I can't seem to find it.

[SteveWh]

I am another who has never dared use the sync feature, though I also have no need for it since I only publish from one location. However, something I thought I'd mention is that during normal, non-synch, publishing if I use the "determine changes by comparing source and destination sites" option, for some reason FP2003 seems to think that any page on the Apache server that a visitor has LOOKED at has been changed, and it reports a "conflict" even though I know full well that it hasn't changed. Maybe each GET changes a datestamp that FP uses to determine conflicts? Anyway, I thought I'd mention this. I'm not confident that FP2003 can properly determine whether a page on an Apache server has *actually* changed, and if you synch, this could cause some problems. Testing it still seems the best way to find out if this will work, but make sure you have a good backup copy of your entire site somewhere safe just in case.

[Corey Bryant]

FP 2002 does not support this feature.

Are you using date / time stamp to compare the files?

-Corey