a Tuesday feature
Trouble-Shooting Your Shockwave Internet Sites
This week I received quite an alarming amount of mail concerning trouble-shooting Internet sites that include Shockwave movies. Since there are obviously a lot of questions floating around out there about this subject, I've decided to dish out a little trouble-shooting advice based on the mail I received and the questions they contained.
These may be very basic for some readers; however, it never hurts to review the basics, and judging by some of the mail I received, I'm hoping this will help a few of you.
The Basics of Trouble-Shooting Shockwave
There are several issues that popped up surrounding the versions of plug-ins that should (or should not) be used to view Shockwave movies on the Web. I suggest that when having problems with the plug-in, you first look to make sure that you are using the latest version. For example, upon helping a reader solve a problem with his site, I discovered that, although he was creating Shockwave Audio correctly, he was not using the latest version of the Shockwave plug-in on the CPU he was testing his site with.
Also, many of the sites I have helped trouble-shoot have resulted in the discovery that the server was not configured properly. You should consult your server's manual for configuring MIME types, but if you already know how to configure a MIME type, then here are the settings for Shockwave you will need to know.Director MIME Type Mappings
AddType--application/x-director dir
AddType--application/x-director dcr
AddType--application/x-director dxr
AddType--application/x-director fgdAuthorware MIME Type Mappings
AddType--application/x-authorware-map aam
AddType--application/x-authorware-seg aas
AddType--application/x-authorware-bin aabFreeHand MIME Type Mappings
AddType--image/x-freehand fh4
AddType--image/x-freehand fh5
AddType--image/x-freehand fhc
AddType--image/x-freehand fh
The Basics of Fixing Broken Icons
There are several reasons why the broken icon image will appear on your Web pages. Three of the most common reasons why broken icons appear are:
1. The Web page HTML references a source file that can't be located or downloaded.
Usually a file can't be located or downloaded because the author has modified or changed the links so they no longer match the links specified by the HTML reference. To prevent broken icons, test the page on a browser after you rename files or move directories.
2. The source file name or type doesn't match the source file name or type designated by the tag.
The file name and type must exactly match the file name and type referenced by the Web page HTML. If it doesn't match exactly, or if there is an error in the HTML syntax, a broken icon appears.
3. The file type isn't recognized by the browser.
A broken icon also appears if the HTML command doesn't recognize the file type. For instance, if you try to display a text file by using the IMG tag, your page will display a broken icon instead of the text because IMG recognizes only graphic image files.
These tips should help to answer most of the questions I have received over the last few weeks. Next week onto bigger and better things.
