Designer Pro X - FTP timeout error when publishing

[jonstrong]

Hi Jon, I like your website layout, clean and simple. My only comment is you could make it easier on the readers eyes (about 95% of your site is text) if you went to 14px instead of 12px.

Yes - thanks. I'm going to experiment with font sizes today (and spacing / background / font size in the Services drop down menu). We actually wanted to get some more images in the site: pure text isn't the best intro, and too much of it can be a turn off to the types of folks we normally work with. I suspect we'll be aiming to 1) add some more imagery to break up the text, and 2) possibly simplifying / reducing some of the text. In the meantime, I'll try out your suggestion. thanks!

Jon

[jonstrong]

Hi Jon, I just noticed that in export options supersite is clicked instead of conventional site. My understanding is that when in supersite mode all the pictures must open before you see the site (perhaps my understanding is wrong), if so this would slow things down. Also you have 3 variants (480,640 and 960px) , I have often read on TG that with 2 you cover most devices, having 3 instead of 2 I believe also slow things down.

Perhaps some of the TG more experienced users could comment on this ( or correct my understanding).

Thank you

Roly

I haven't had a chance to experiment with these features yet - supersite and the variants supporting a responsive site. Once I get the full size site nailed down, I have to take a look at the variants and figure out how to populate / update them...and if I can get away with only two variants, I'll get this first version finished that much faster. Thx!

[jonstrong]

Hi,

Just to add my 2 cents or give you insight in what we do here, the first step we take in debugging a failure in FTP publishing is running the debugview program while publishing before suggesting any changes to the registry. Sometimes there are errors occurring while uploading that help identify the problem, which don't appear within Xara. This requires changing a setting in the registry to enable output of publishing information, please see instructions below:

{...details omitted by Jon, as they appear a few posts above this in the thread!}

Lastly don't be afraid to send us at support a ticket and we can look into this and even see if we can replicate the error here by publishing to your host. FTP publishing can be a rather fickle process at times, restarting your PC then trying again seems to work a lot of the time (more than it should lol).

Thanks
Rob

Rob - thank you! This lines up well with what I found when googling the topic. Good to make this visible here as well, in case it can help anyone else who runs into issues like this.

I did open a support ticket -- but as soon as I got the issue resolved by moving to a newer GoDaddy hosting configuration (turns out my prior config was more than 10 years old -- not 7 as I had thought yesterday!), I added a comment to the ticket explaining this, and changed the status to closed. I didn't want to create unnecessary work for the support team once I had the answer.

Along with your suggestions, I'm hoping that others reading this will also note the issue that was causing the FTP problem for me: it had nothing to do with Xara software, but was a side effect of the hosting environment I was uploading to. People who have tried the kinds of fixes that Rob discusses but are still running into issues should consider the possibility that there's an issue with their web host, and explore this with them. When I mentioned what I was experiencing to the support tech at GoDaddy, he immediately noted that I was on an old (10 year old!) hosting platform and that they have "known" issues with it, along the lines of what I had been experiencing. As soon as I switched over to their newer platform, the Publish / FTP issues disappeared completely. Had I not called, and had my hosting agreement not been up for renewal next month, I might never have been told about this "known issue", and would have continued to pursuing a solution from Xara, or "conceding" that I could only publish via manual FTP outside the Xara product. My takeway: try the approach that Rob suggests...and if your issue still doesn't get resolved, check with your hosting provider.

[Rob-Xar]

That's great to hear :) I've always had a hit and miss experience dealing with hosting support personnel, some have been absolutely fantastic and sometimes they have no idea and just say it's the programs fault...

I've found GoDaddy to be generally helpful, another very good service is NameCheap. Their support is fantastic and hosting really good.