When I try to open my Freeway website downloaded from the server using Transmit (because I have lost the original file)
I get the message -
“Could not open ‘2022redoMarch.freeway’ because end of file”.
Please what does that mean and what can I do?
Hi Marie,
Freeway documents aren’t normally uploaded to a server (just the HTML files and associated resources), so I wonder if the file that you’re trying to open really is a Freeway document (although .freeway is the correct extension). This particular message might also occur if a Freeway document has been corrupted or truncated.
Do you have backups of the original document on a Time Machine disk?
If you don’t have the original document in any form, one way to recreate your website would be to start a new document and copy/paste content from a browser (showing your old website) into the new document.
I wonder if Marie uploaded the Freeway file to the server, but because the server isn’t a Mac, something happened like the Resource fork got separated or didn’t upload. I can’t remember if that’s still a thing.
Is Walter’s classic instruction for how to recreate a website using screen shots and Freeway still available somewhere? The gist is to take screenshots of the web site you want to recreate, make them a background layer or something like that in Freeway, then recreate those elements by drawing or placing them in Freeway on top of the screen shot. In a pinch, you can use the screen shot to recreate the images as well.
Dear Jeremy
Further to my message of a minute ago -
Sorry to be confusing - there IS a .freeway file outside of the folder - that is the file that gives me the message.It is “2022redoMarch.freeway”, the name of the Freeway site.
Perhaps it should be inside the folder with all the other files that I listed??? Or somewhere else on the Server?
Marie
Hello Jeremy
Thanks for your eagerly anticipated reply.
The downloaded folder contains:
- 16 pages as html (which include 16 very long texts)
- sitemap xml
- index html
4 Resources Folder containing the 76 large graphic images - urlist.txt
- .clear gif
- .siteinfo
There is not a file with .freeway extension in the folder. Could it be somewhere else separate on the Server?.
I think you can see why (above) I’m none too keen on your suggestion to start a new document and copy/paste content from a browser …
Rather too much and not much time.
And - No I do not have any backups as a hard disk was lost.
I felt sure that I had read somewhere that one could download a Freeway website that one had already uploaded to the Server - but failed to retain the “how”.
Could you have another think please and meanwhile I will brace myself for some allnight sessions with Freeway. (I am not a professional - very amateur and slow).
Best Wishes
Marie
What a memory you have, Joe! I just wasted a few minutes looking for that post. It used to be really find-able by looking for the phrase “pin to the wall”. The only thing you left out of your capsule description of the steps is to open the screen-grabs in Photoshop or similar and “ghost them back” to 50% opacity. That lets you build on top of it without making pixel-level errors.
Walter
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Hi Marie,
What version of Freeway are you using? Look in About Freeway under the Freeway menu.
Hello
It is 7,
best
Marie
Hi Marie,
It is 7
In that case the first thing you should do is update to the latest version of Freeway (7.1.4). You can do this by going to the Freeway page on our website and clicking on “Download Freeway 7 here” after “Already own it?”. Try opening your document again after you’ve done this.
Hello Jeremy -Sorry - it is Freeway Pro 7.1.4 that I am using - (was not at home) Marie
OK. The error message that you are getting suggests that the document is corrupted or truncated in some way. It might be worth trying to download it from the server a second time, in case there was a problem with the first download.
Good suggestion, but I’m pretty sure that Freeway documents don’t have (or at least don’t need) a resource fork. The actual data is stored in the data fork, and has been since Freeway 4 (or earlier).
If you don’t have any luck after re-downloading, you could share the document with me via a file transfer service (e.g. Dropbox) and I’ll take a look at it, but I’m not sure if there is anything I can do. Another possibility: Freeway automatically saves backup files (with a .fwbackup extension) - you don’t have one of these do you?
Hi Jeremy
No good news - re-downloaded file and still the same message - will send you the file. It is 12 MB
so can I use Filemail? where to address it to - same as this one?
No backups found I’m afraid.
Becoming a bit resigned.
Thanking you for your valuable help,
Marie
Hi Jeremy
Here is a Dropbox link to the file -2022redoMarch 2.freeway
Hope it works!
Best Wishes
Marie
Walter, that post was a classic. I thought we all had a link or copy of it somewhere. We shared it so many times with new FW users wanting to import existing sites into Freeway I figured we all had it memorized. I wonder if it’s still somewhere.
[Does a search]
I found it! It’s “staple to the wall,” at least in this version.
https://www.softpress.com/kb/questions/40/Fast+Way+to+Recreate+a+Website
Marie, if you do end up needing to recreate your web site, the above link should get you going.
Joe
Hi Marie,
I got the file, and I can see that it is a Freeway document (I opened it in a hex editor). Unfortunately, I’m not able to open it in Freeway. I tried a couple of versions of Freeway that I have on an old system, but I get the same error message, which means that the document is truncated or corrupted in some other way.
In the past, we sometimes managed to recover damaged documents by opening them in a debug version of Freeway and using a debugger to see where the document is damaged. But this was time-consuming, and I no longer have a system that is old enough to do this.
Freeway doesn’t import HTML files. There is an Import option in the File menu, but we mostly advise people not to use it - it doesn’t work at all well, but you could try it out of desperation. The way we’ve always advised people to import sites is to copy and paste content from a browser (you can also reimport images). If you want to preserve the exact appearance of your old site, you could follow Walter’s suggestion and use a screenshot as a background image to position boxes and content. But if it was me, I would start afresh and create a modern flexible site with the same content. You can use Freeway to do this (using inflow layout) but it’s tricky because Freeway wasn’t originally designed to do this and Freeway’s support for inflow layout is quite buggy. Alternatively, if you have a machine that runs High Sierra or Mojave or later, you could use Xway.
It’s actually called Get HTML… (Import is for importing resources).