GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression Prior Blog Posts by Date Category covering Microsoft Expression topics. Mainly focused on Expression Web (and FrontPage) because that's what I use to create this site. Also covers Expression Media, which I am using for slide shows. October 2008 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat       1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31   Apr   Nov RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net Index of prior posts by title Use this calendar to navigate thru prior blog postings by date. Saturday, April 19, 2008    Microsoft Expression Media for photo galleries on your site   I've been promoting the benefits of Microsoft FrontPage - and now it's replacement Microsoft Expression Web. Expression Web is the best way to create your own website: it's simple enough for complete web amateurs to use, and powerful enough for web professionals - especially with it's new CSS and standards support. One concern is migrating from FrontPage to Expression Web. If you're not using any special features of FrontPage you can do it with no preparation or training - but of course that doesn't mean you'll be taking advantage of new features in Expression Web or building standards-compliant websites. Fortunately, training is available online for free from several sites and of course Amazon.com has several excellent books. And a nice training disc also comes with Expression Web. A complication is a handful of features that were dropped: all old, obscure, and to a degree proprietary or far from meeting standards. The one you are likely to run into is that FrontPage has built-in a photo gallery tool which Expression Web no longer has. The galleries will run in Expression Web-generated sites (they just reply on Javascript), but you cannot edit the old ones or create new ones. So the question becomes, what to use as a replacement? There are several choices... none of which integrate with Expression Web. The next best choice would be an external tool which imports your photos from your disk and creates all of the HTML and associated scripts/CSS/etc to display the images in an orderly way. I surveyed several of these tools that are on the market and found several interesting variants. I settled on Microsoft Expression Media. Expression Media is used to manage directories of images, has annotation tools that can work on one or many images at once, and has an HTML-generating gallery tool. The gallery tool creates a directory or files that can be easily dropped into Expression Web and uploaded to your site. And the code it creates is not proprietary - it's browser and server independent. A screen shot is shown below. Several themes are available (and yes they are indeed customizable, fortuantely!), which align thumbnails on various places on the HTML page. One particularly nice feature is the option on the second tab to have a watermark put on each image (tremendously useful to me because I post dozens of images at a time and they would all have to be editted otherwise). Several other options are available to help you customize the resulting pages. Note that while I'm using beta code of the next version, the current version has the same functionality in this regards. My next step in the never-ending revisioning of my own sites will be to remove all vestiges of the FrontPage photogalleries. That'll be the last of the FrontPage-specific code left on my sites. An example of a simple photogallery created with Expression Media can be found here: Example - Solstice Club Drive. There are lots more options for me to try, although in this case I left it simple because the gallery includes 233 images and I wanted my readers to be able to scroll thru them very quickly.   View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net Sunday, March 09, 2008    Expression Web v2 b1 versus FrontPage 2003   In my initial testing, I quickly found wrong in both Expression Web v1 and v2. Note how the frame below renders in the editor. The image above is Expression Web v2 - and it's the same in v2. The image below it is the same frame under FrontPage 2003. Note that it shows correctly (truly WYSIWYG). The item in question is a table of three rows and several columns. The middle row is only 1 pixel tall. This is suppossed to be the yellow line down the middle of a highway ("driving", get it?). The gearshift knob is an overlay the the upper left corner. That may be effecting how Expression Web presents the editting window. Note that the site does show the page properly in IE 7 or 8, and any of those "other" browsers too. View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net  Microsoft Expression Web v2 - beta 1 testing   I'm busy testing beta 1 of Expression Web Version 2. One page from my site is shown to the left. This just arrived this week, so I have not yet been able to test every feature, let alone try the new ones. After two days of testing, though, there is one thing very clear. My prior 2 installations of Expression Web Version 1 both suffered from occasional bombs... whereas Version 2 is (so far) 100% stable. My attempt this morning of incorporating Silverlight v2 "Deep Zoom" failed because of my own lack of knowledge about Silverlight. This would seem to be ideal to close-up zoom of the super high-res photos I like to put into this site. I'll clearly need more help before  I can implement this feature... There are more issues with Expression Web, and I'll go into those in the short term future. View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net Wednesday, January 24, 2007    Praising the virtues of FrontPage, er, Expression Web   I've been a user of FrontPage since before Microsoft purchased it ~ten years ago. In fact, my first day as an employee of Microsoft in Redmond coincided with the first days of the FrontPage folks who moved to Redmond as new MS employees. We all went thru the famous first-badge process together. I was jealous... I would very much have liked to work on that team! I created my series of websites (DrivingEnthusiast.net, S2000Enthusiast.com, etc) with FrontPage, and I could not possibly have gotten to the point of several thousand pages and images without powerful tools such as FrontPage. How these sites ever get this large? FrontPage is the enabler. I could not have done it otherwise. Literally impossible. I'm not a professional web site developer and never have been (that much is clear from my site!). I have no formal website coding or design training. So without any background, FrontPage has provided the means to create and manage these sites. It's simple and straightforward. I've even got several friends as well as my Mom using FrontPage for their own sites!  But things change, industry standards evolve, and FrontPage was getting in need of an update. That came in the form of "Expresson Web", which replaces FrontPage. Don't listen to the marketing hype from Microsoft - this is simply a new version of FrontPage and is not an all-new product. It may have been rewritten a bit under the covers, and it does get new branding and join a family of Expression products. But you or I can use Expression Web in the same exact way as we'd been using FrontPage all along. There are two very important things to note about Expression Web: there is considerable new function the product is very clearly aligned wth industry standards. So we can now build a better site: one more closely aligned with industry standards, one that will work better on more client platforms that support these standards, a site that is consistent across all of it's pages (a particular problem with my sites), and one that is more easily extensible going forward. But how do I get started on the "migration" of my site? Well, Expression Web opens my FrontPage site the same way Frontage does. You edit the site the same way. It publishes the changes the same way. So, I already have Expression Web (I was in the beta program) and it's transparent to me. But that doesn't mean I'm exploiting the new power of Expression Web. Not one iota. And this is my task for the next few months... to figure out a good way to get started exploiting what it can do. That means developing a template... working thru the QuickStart Guides, choosing places to use XML (my lits of movies on CarMovieEnthusiast.com?). And leveraging CSS far more extensively. I want to develop a section of my site where I show "regular people" - non-developers - how to use Expression Web for a "hobbyist"type site such as mine. I'm planning on doing that in my usual way - meaning lots of graphics and examples. Look for it!   View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net Monday, May 29, 2006    History of FrontPage           SEOConsultants.com has a short story on the history of FrontPage. I've used all of these versions, including the Vermeer original version - and I'm a big fan of them all. Currently, I'm beta testing the replacements for FrontPage - Microsoft Expression Web Designer and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer 2007 Beta 2. It's been rough going so far... there are interface issues with both, neither works very well (SharePoint Designer is workable... barely, and Expression doesn't really work at all) and I probably will have to switch back to FrontPage 2003 to get any work on this site done. Note that the rest of Office 2007 Beta 2 is great... the replacements for FrontPage are obviously trailing behind in the work they need to finish before the end of the year milestone for ship. View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! RSS Feed for DrivingEnthusiast.net About DrivingEnthusiast.net Friday, May 19, 2006    The Future of FrontPage   Microsoft's take: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA101205221033.aspx My take: SharePoint Designer and Expression Web Designer - in my opinion - are not *new* tools - they are a simple evolutionary branch from FrontPage with new function. The split was to create separate products for two separate groups of users - those who use SharePoint and those who do not. There is no way I can use SharePoint on this site - as much as I'd like to, so so that means I fit into the group that would use Expression Web Designer. IMHO, Microsoft has now blown up the FrontPage name with their clumsy explanation of this split. FrontPage is a *highly* respected and well known brand name. #1 in the business, used by tons of individuals. So far, MS did not handle the communication of this split well - and they are taking a big leap out onto a limb in my humble opinion (as a user of FrontPage back to pre-MS days). So, as I move to Expression in the next few weeks for this site, everything I've said in the past about FrontPage still applies 100% - because Expression Web Designer is nothing more than the next release of FrontPage. The graphic to the right in this post is Microsoft's. It's used for Expression Web Designer. Interesting to note that these people are doing work - alledgedly with Expression Web Designer - on a TabletPC. Very cool!  Reference: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/web_designer/default.mspx View and add comments: Trackback: Trackback Link and count:;[] Permalink for this post:  See similar posts in these categories: GeekZone - Microsoft | GeekZone - Microsoft: Expression | Website - Microsoft Expression Web Search for similar posts on the web: Google It! 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