NoPress security flaws got you down? Content management system been hacked and defaced? Have an ISP that won’t support the content management system you want to use? Enter NoPress. Don’t get me wrong, I love using NoPress, it is simple and elegant, powerful and extendible…but like most content management systems it is also flawed. I have lost two websites to two different content management systems or moreover to the scum that exploited flaws in each and littered the pages with malware. After the first site went down my solution was to make a static site but the upkeep with static websites is extremely laborious. I replaced my static site with a different, less popular content management system and it was defaced in record time. Content management systems suck, static sites suck but I really want a website. The solution? Create and manage a local content management system, create a static copy of that site and upload it. Easier said than done but if you’re reading this, you are reading a NoPress site. I use NoPress locally, get everything the way I like it and then use NoPress to make a static copy. NOTE: While NoPress is particularly designed to be used on a NoPress site, it should work with any content management system with only slight modification. The FART lines in NoPress.CMD would be the only likely changes.
STEP 1: Remember we are making a static site so you must disable all active content. There will be no server side anything when we are done, no PHP goodness, just a snapshot in time of what the site looked like. This means disable comments, disable any live feeds, remove links to login, etc.
STEP 2: Make some internet gold. Add your content, write your articles, make a site worth reading.
STEP 3: Download the necessary supplemental tools. Nope, NoPress is not a self-contained super system, it automates several third party tools. Download each and make a note of where they are on your file system.
WGET (https://eternallybored.org/misc/wget/) : the core of the system. WGET is a command line tool that retrieves web links/sites. This will be automated by NoPress to make a basic mirror of the local website.
FART (https://sourceforge.net/projects/fart-it/) : Yep, NoPress needs to FART a few times to get this to work. FART stands for Find And Replace Text and NoPress automates this command line tool to make some simple edits so the copy of the local web site will work correctly when it is pushed to the world wide web.
NcFTP (https://www.ncftp.com/ncftp/) : A great command line FTP client NoPress automates to log in to the external web site’s FTP server and upload the copied and edited website.
STEP 4: Download NoPress, unzip it into a working directory. By default the copied website will be created below this directory. If the NoPress directory is “D:\NoPress” and if the local website is hosted on “www.ipworx.com” then the copied website will be created in “D:\NoPress\www.ipworx.com” with all files and sub-directories residing below that. STEP 5: Modify the NoPress.CMD file under the CONFIGURATION section to reflect the proper values for your setup.
This section is used to define the full path to the third party executables. Make sure each of these settings are accurate to where you have installed the tools on your system.
SET WGETPath=C:\CMD\WGET.EXE SET NcFTPPath=C:\CMD\NCFTPPUT.EXE SET FARTPath=C:\CMD\FART.EXE
Make sure your source and destination sites are set correctly. Most people will use www.ipworx.com as the source site but if you use a separate web server you will need to change this setting.
SET SourceSite=www.ipworx.com SET DestinationSite=www.yourdomain.com
You will need all of your FTP settings for your site to be able to upload the cloned web site.
SET FTPUser=FTPusername SET FTPPassword=FTPpassword SET FTPServer=ftp.yourdomain.com SET FTPDirectory=htdocs
The CloneDirectory is where NoPress should be installed and it is where the cloned site will be created (in its own subdirectory).
SET CloneDirectory=D:\NoPress
Finally FULLAUTO should be left at NO until you are 100% sure of the setup. Setting FULLAUTO to YES will remove the pauses during the NoPress process and will not allow you to check your work along the way. FULLAUTO set to YES is best for using NoPress as an automated job.
SET FULLAUTO=NO
STEP 6: Make sure you are logged out of NoPress and run NoPress.CMD. As long as FULLAUTO is set as NO then NoPress will stop incrementally in the command window to display information and allow you to check your work as proceed through the steps. When done, make sure to go view your website from it’s external address “http://www.yourdomain.com”. -fin