Mk's dashboard

Update -

After more than 3 weeks of fighting this issue with broken links in my blog - I'm waving the white flag and moving my blog over to Word Press. My Hosting service has Fantastico scripts for creating Word Press blogs so I'll just drop in the links over on the Yola side and keep my blog OUTSIDE the Yola world.

While this is a workable solution - it was not the optimal one. Nevertheless - I've come to the conclusion that if you're planning to host your site *outside* of Yola - think long and hard, do your homework and test it early before you spend a lot of hours on design and layout inside Yola.

While Monique (and the other support folks) did a great job in assisting me with the various problems I encountered - needless to say the Yola scripts are far too complex and take far too long to debug. Even if you have solid PHP experience deciphering the Yola scripts take far too much time to make it worth your while. EDITORIAL NOTE: I still think the Yola folks would be well served in sharing a bit of insight into their scripts and overall architecture for self-publishers. Without it you're left with trying to figure out what code segments like the following actually do:

===========
//Add the 'Text' component to the region
$text_91 = new Text($pageContext, $text_91_componentProps);
$masterComponentList[] = $text_91;
$pageProperties['regions']['sys_region_1'][] = $text_91;

$pageProperties['masterComponentList'] = $masterComponentList;
=================

If you are still considering self hosting here's a few tips:

1. Hosting Provider
Make sure your hosting provider is using standard tools and services (Cpanel, Fantastico, SQLite, etc.)

2. Self-Publishing Your Yola Website
This could be a 30 minute task or a 1 month task depending on your experience, hosting service provider, steps you took to self-publish and complexity o your Yola site. While it is totally possible to self-publish (my site is now up on my own server), if you lack the technical know-how to navigate through the maze of php, DNS, html and other issues - I'd strongly suggest other alternatives (including hosting your site with Yola).

3. Yola spun Blogs
If you are self-publishing a blog or have a blog integrated into a self-published site - there is a pretty good chance you WILL NOT get it to work (that's based on my experience at least). There are a myriad of things that could cause you problems and the SQLite element of the Yola spun blog creates another layer of unmanageable complexity. My issue was ALL of the links to each of my blog posts spit out 404 Errors. ALL OF THEM!! So while I would have preferred building my blog in Yola - it simply does not work for self-publishing.

Hope this is somewhat helpful to all you wanna be self-publishers out there.

cheers,

mk

Monique-
Yes I think your wording is quite adequate - thanks for adding it and I think it should prove helpful to others considering self-hosting.

Regarding some of the limitations of a Yola hosted site, I can only share some of the issues I've come across that could either limit or prevent one from hosting their site on Yola:

1. Security or Contractual Requirements
Some Yola users may be subject to strict security policies that could preclude the option of Yola hosting. Whether it is data security or simply their site requires strict adherence to all content sitting behind a firewall.

2 Dynamic Data
Some sites may have requirements for displaying or generating dynamic content (Widgets and Widgetized forms not withstanding) so while they may choose to use the Yola services to build a portion of the site their dynamic data needs will restrict hosting the site (without a fair amount of complexity) with Yola.

3. Performance and/or Scalability
While I'm sure the Yola hosting servers are robust and capable of handling a fair amount of traffic - for some sites the issue of performance and/or scalability may come into play. Dedicated Servers and Cloud Services (like EC2) are specifically designed to provide a highly available and scalable platform at a reasonable price.

4. Access to storage sub-system
Some sites may require direct access to web root - with Yola hosting you have very limited access to your web pages file system.

5. Web Traffic Monitoring and Analysis
While Yola provides some tools for this - some users may require other tools that must be configured within the Server (Apache) or System environment.

I could go into much more detail on a few of these and no doubt there are certainly other issues that could limit the abilty or option of Yola hosting. But I hope the list above provides some context to the issue.

regards,

mk – mk, on June 17, 2009 16:58

Monique -

I received your email regarding the phpinfo() page for my hosted server. I just sent the requested information over to you via the Yola Support Form on the yola.com website.

Thanks again!

mk

Thanks Monique! And I do **really** appreciate all your help with this. Unfortunately as I stated before - I simply DO NOT have the option of publishing my site on Yola - it simply is NOT possible.

My only frustration here is I spent at least 2 weeks working on the site under the assumption that I'd be able to host it on the server of my choice (as indicated in your FAQ and other documentation - and plus I had successfully self-published another site over a year ago). I also assumed that if I had *reasonable* technical experience I'd be able to successfully deploy my Yola spun site with a fair amount of confidence.

Here's where the problem comes in - the two problems I encountered are fairly obvious - that is - both bugs render the site (and blog in this case) virtually unusable. Now I totally understand the Yola service is FREE of charge and as well as the SUPPORT you folks are providing. Personally I think you folks have been AWESOME in your commitment and support to your users here on the forum - I personally think its BETTER than some of the PAID services I have.

But I do think there's room for improvement - mainly in either changing the FAQ to say "While self-publishing is allowed, Yola can't guarantee that self-publishing will work". That way people will understand the risk involved - BEFORE they invest time in building a site that will not work outside of the Yola environment. The other issue is testing - if you do plan to continue to provide self-publishing, I'm sure there's enough users that are more than willing to help you folks in testing any new releases of your scripts!!

This is being done all over the web and has been for years (where users participate directly in the testing and QA of a product) and is a REALLY great way to insure your product/service maintains its high standard of quality. By simply allowing some your knowledgeable users to be part of the **release** process I'm sure it would have uncovered both of these bugs and saved both your team and **some of us** a LOT of time.

Note to all Yola Self-Publishers!!!!
---------------------------------------------
If anyone else that is or wants to self-publish feel the same way... and would be willing to be part of testing any updates to Yola's scripts (by simply downloading and updating your site with the latest Yola script files) then I STRONGLY suggest you let Monique and the rest of the Yola team know that you support this idea. If you don't speak up now - then you can't complain when you run into problems later!!

regards,

mk

Monique -

One quick point on this issue - after I self published, I checked and the directory structure of my Yola spun website that I uploaded to my Hosting Server and it has the following directories:

- blog
- classes
- definitions
- resources
- templates

Inside the blog directory there is only 1 file:
-blog
- data.db

Obviously this is the SQLite DB file for my blog. I grabbed the actual link that appears on my self-published blog which has the following pointer:

http://www.myowndomain.com/myblog/my-...

A few things to note:
1. There is NO "myblog" directory in my web root - I'm assuming this is a problem since the link is pointing to a directory and file (or resource) that does not exist!!!

2. So I decided to try the following - I created a *new* directory called "myblog" and dropped the "data.db" file that was in the "www.myowndomain.com/blog"
directory. I also set the file permissions to the same as the originals. My assumption was that your scripts simply didn't account for naming my blog something other than "blog". Well the results were the same - still broken links to ALL of my blog posts.

3. If you folks would provide a fully functional REFERENCE or SAMPLE self-published site along with the **correct** directory structure - it would save many of us a LOT of time. Because at this point - I don't even know what I'm looking for!!

The solution to this bug should be fairly simple since you folks know what the *correct* structure and file listing should be for a properly functioning site. Of course I'm assuming that the SQLite database file (data.db) is correct. All I did was follow the Yola directions and now I'm 2 weeks into self-publishing and still debugging a problem that I can't analyze.

Not Good.... not good at all :-(

Thomas,

Not sure if you got this resolved or not - but a few things. When you save your website from Yola - the format is .zip. For self-publishing you should:
1. Download the zip file from Yola
2. Unzip the files on YOUR computer BEFORE you push up to GoDaddy. Note: You'll need an FTP Client program (Filezilla, CuteFTP, etc.), I use Filezilla.
3. Next you'll need to setup the ftp user login details you got from Godaddy in your FTP Client program.
4. Then you'll upload your files to the web root directory specified by GoDaddy. The FTP client will upload the files and keep the directory structure of your zip archive exactly the same as you had in the Yola environment.
Note: There is a BUG I found in the Yola scripts for self-publishing in that the php scripts are missing a file called "domain.info" - seems this file needs to be in your web root directory - this is a text file that has just 1 line in it - the name of your GoDaddy domain name (e.g. http://www.mydomain.com) without this your php scripts my end up pointing back to the yolasite.com files. By adding the "domain.info" it will correctly point to your GoDaddy domain name instead of the www.yourwebsite.yolasite.com

Yeah - I know it's a LOT to digest, but that's why if you don't have a much technical experience in this area it's better to just host on site on Yola.

Hope this helps.

mk – mk, on June 16, 2009 04:58

Monique -

I just got your email from the Support Request I submitted - thanks. I'll await your updates. By the way I replied to your email - so hopefully you'll get my email message too.

thanks

mk

Thomas -
Is this problem with your Blog or your actual Yola spun website? Also provide a **brief** explanation of the problems you are having.

Note - It will probably be best to move your issue to a separate post - but let's get the basic info before we decide if it's actually related to my issue.

mk

we're pre-launch - so I'm not allowed to give it out in public. I did send it in the email I sent you (that you never recieved :-( ). Seems you aren't receiving **any** of my emails and I haven't received any of yours. :-(

Maybe I can just submit a support ticket with the details?

No that's the main one - just drop your updates here (GetSatisfaction sends me email whenever you update this thread). This is REALLY getting frustrating - so any help you can provide would be VERY much appreciated.

mk

Monique -

Hmmm.... as of 1 minute ago I have received your email either - not sure what's going on here. Just to confirm my email is: mkstr77@gmail.com

The Duke -
No problem and thanks for the helping hand. You're right about the pioneer statement - just wish it was someone else blazing the trial ;-). I will be sure to post a detailed account of my adventures in Self-publishing - hopefully it will save others a LOT of time.

Monique -

Here ya go - mkstr77[at]gmail

Monique/Duke -

Correction - after looking at the url a little closer seems the Blog itself and all Blog links are linking back to the "mydomain.yolasite.com/myblog" link - obviously this is incorrect since I'm self-publishing - the link should be "mydomain.com/myblog".

I then checked out the actual link to my Blog that's on my index page and it resolves as follows:

www.mydomain.com/myblog.php [This s the name of my blog page]

So while the link points to my self-published Blog, the Yola script seems to be re-directing to the yolasite.com blog page.

The Duke -
the blog link resolves as follows:
http://www.mydomain.com/myblog/my-fir...

I checked in the blog directory and it's empty :-( - but I'm not sure if all I need to do to fix this is drop in the entry titles with hyphens as space delimiters.

Monique -
Thank! I sending it over now!

Monique -

I sent a fairly detailed e-mail to your Support folks at the support@yola.com email early last week - but so far I've received no reply :-(.

Any suggestions on what I should do next? I can submit a ticket - but since self-publishing "isn't supported" I'm not sure if it'll just get yanked from your queue. To recap - none of my Blog links work when I self-publish. The date on the email I sent was June 10th.

Monique -

Yes - we figured that out and fixed it on our end. But thanks so much for following up on this. It took us about 16hrs to find this bug since we had to isolate other potential issues on our end such as DNS settings, PHP configurations, Apache settings, etc. I think in most cases we assume that the problem is on the hosting side and not in the scripts. Thanks again for the confirmation - it's much appreciated!

On a similar note - we also have a Blog setup on with this self-published website and yep we're having problems with the blog too. When clicking on any of the Blog post links (or "continue reading..." links) we are getting 404 Errors. It seems there's an issue with the .htaccess file - but since your Blog Widget uses a database for each blog post - we have no idea how to fix this. Any help you folks can provide would be much appreciated. If you like I can email you the actual blog url so your tech folks can see it for themselves.

BTW - We did confirm that our hosting provider (Hostgator.com) supports SQLite 3.x

Peter

My pleasure and I agree with you. I think Yola is a FANTASTIC service - but it just seems they REALLY want to keep you on their platform. I'm sure for 95% of the folks this is totally acceptable. But the difference from a FANTASTIC service and a GREAT service is being able to address the needs of the other 5% to some level of reasonable satisfaction.

The fact that in the good ol' days of synthasite self publishing was as easy as falling down - now it seems there's a deliberate effort to make it a bit problematic to self-publish. I just think it's the wrong approach. I've read numerous posts in this forum where the Yola folks always make it clear that "you're really better off simply hosting your site with us". That's great if one has the choice of hosting with you - but again there are always exceptions.

If the Yola folks are listening - my suggestion is to provide a basic tutorial on your php scripts and overall logic behind the scripts and best practices for self-publishing. You've already made it clear that you cannot support folks that self-publish (and this is totally reasonable). But by taking that extra step of openness you will create a LOT of good will.

Instead you provide a 7 line README.txt file that gives minimal information on requirements for self-publishing. NOT GOOD - do the right thing and open up a bit, publish a tutorial on the philosophy and architecture behind your scripts - encourage others to publish "How To" or Tutorials for hosting a Yola bred site on another hosting service.

it's obvious you folks have spent a fair amount of time working on your architecture. So take the next step and the remaining 5% of your userbase will be your biggest advocates.

mk

Okay - problem solved.
Seems you guys call for a "domains.info" file in your script. That file needs to have the proper entry or else it redirects to the placeholder page.

I'm gonna take a closer look at your script files to see if I can figure out what happens when someone first publishes with Yola and then unpublishes.... and then self publishes - since these were the steps I took. Somehow your scripts didn't properly update.

On a side note - I first used your service back when you were still called synthasite.com and although you guys have done a lot of great work on the service - it's become more and more problematic for self-publishers.

When I self-published my first project - it was literally a 10 minute task. This took about 16 hrs. since I was not able to isolate what was causing the redirect. And your php scripts are practically useless unless you're a crack php developer - but then you need to spend a fair amount of time getting familiar with your environment.

Now I'm tracking down a problem with the Blog Widget as I'm getting 404 errors when I click on my "continue reading" links.

I understand that most people choose to publish with Yola - but for the folks who don't or can't -- seems you need to provide a bit more information about how your scripts work :-) or provide more documentation/comments in your php files.

Just my $0.02 -- thanks!!

Thanks Duke - I'm checking with Hostgator now to see if it's something on their end. I'll update here once I get the info.