HTML for Technophobes.
©David Knopfler/Willa Cline July 1998

Chapter Four: FTP

Connecting to your host server with your PC or Mac

Once you've created your web page, you have to get it out on the Internet so that other people can see it, that is, if you want other people to see it. If you're happy with your website residing on the hard drive of your computer, you can skip this part. I know, you'd like to skip it anyway. This is one of the scariest parts of creating a web site, and possibly the most difficult to understand (at least it was for me).

To get your web pages to your host server, you have to do something called File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for short. Your internet service provider probably gave you an FTP program when you signed up, and there are FTP applications built into American Online software and the software of other online service providers too, I imagine.

MacUsers this way (Trust me you don't want to read about C directories do you?)

Now the rather smug have gone, we can continue without unecessary interuption: The most common PC-based FTP program is WS-FTP. Before you can use WS-FTP to upload files, you'll need to know the following things:

You probably already know your userid and password. If you don't, you'll have to call your ISP and find out. You may or may not know your hostname. You might be able to find it in your ISP's technical support page on the web, or it may be easier to simply call them up and ask them.

In any event, once you have all of that information, you can start up WS-FTP and take a look. The first thing you see when you run WS-FTP is the Session Profile window. A profile contains the information needed to connect to your web site. You'll need to create a profile because the ones that come with WS-FTP won't connect you to your own web site. Give the profile a name ("My Web Site" is a good one) and fill in the userid, password and hostname which were given to you by your ISP.



Select Auto detect for the Host Type. You should also select Save Password and Auto Save Config unless you want to do this all over again every time you want to FTP something to your host server. You don't, do you? I didn't think so. All of the other fields can be left blank. Ready to connect? Okay. Take a deep breath and click "OK."


How to Transfer Files

When you connect to the web server, you will connect directly to the home directory of your account. WS-FTP will display a split screen where files on the left-hand side are within your own computer. The right-hand side of the screen will show several folders such as bin, cgi-local, dev, etc, lib, and stats which are landmarks suggesting a successful connection to your web site. Congratulations! Now what?



 



To upload a file or files, simply highlight the file(s) on the left and click the right-arrow button in the center of the screen. To transfer a file to a subdirectory, double-click the appropriate subdirectory to open it before transferring the desired file. And that's it! Easy, wasn't it? Well, maybe not. But probably not as bad as you expected.

Note: It's usually recommended that you upload HTML documents and scripts in ASCII mode and graphic images in BINARY mode. However, I generally upload everything in binary mode and it all seems to work . . . No promises, though.

Back to index