Backstage Pass to Internet
course developed by: Alan Damon

Get the show on the road - How to publish your masterpiece

To publish your work, you will need the following 3 things:

• A hosting service for your site.

• An FTP program so that your computer can exchange files with the server.

• The password and other technical information about your hosting service in order to get your FTP program to work.

The hosting service is either a company you pay each month to keep your site on their server or it is free of charge. In the former case, there are no pop-up advertisements or banners on your site. In the latter, there are. One of the services included in the monthly fee paid to an access provider (AOL, Numericable, etc), is web site hosting. Many members of these services don't know that they have up to 100 Mb of space available for their own web pages. Two drawbacks to such a system are 1) the URL of your site could be painfully long and 2) some access providers have their own special way of making it very tedious to publish pages.

You may choose to have a hosting service which is free of charge in exchange for advertisements popping up on your pages. This is the case of www.lo.st or www.chez.com. Both are fast and easy to publish.

The FTP program I recommend is called WS_FTP. It is free for educational institutions. There are others CuteFTP or FTP Explorer which do pretty much the same thing. FTP means File Transfer Protocol and these programs use a "channel" of the Internet which is different from "http", where we do most of our surfing. The program WS_FTP allows us to connect to the hosting service's server and copy files one way or the other. Copying files from our machine to the server is called uploading and copying files from the server to our computer is called downloading. The program is simple to use because it has two windows which show you at all times the contents of your folders on your computer and the folders on the server. When you upload a web page to the server, you are publishing the page and it becomes available instantaneously.

Download WS_FTP

The password and other technical information are also necessary for the FTP program to work. When you sign up with a hosting service they ask you for two things, your user ID such as "jbond" and your password, such as "spy007".  They will then tell you what ftp address to use to hook up to the server and upload files. The address for Chez is "ftp.chez.com".  Let's imagine that a James Bond fan named Freddy wanted to set up his own fan club site at Chez. Once he opens his account with Chez, he can run the program WS_FTP. The first time he uses this program, he will have to configure a new "profile" by clicking on the New button. Here is what he would type in:

Here is an explanation of the information in the window above: The Profile Name can be anything he wants. It's just there to remind Freddy which site he will be hooking up to. The Host Name/Address is the ftp address. The Host Type can be left on automatic. The User ID is the name Freddy reserved. Notice how the Password only shows up in asterisks so that no one can see what he typed. If he checks the box marked Save Pwd, his password will be saved and he won't have to type it in each time. This is optional. The other boxes can be left blank. By clicking on OK, the program will hook up the the server at Chez and it will hook Freddy up to his folder called "jbond".  Before you click OK, be sure you are hooked up to Internet!

Words of Wisdom: If you set up an account anywhere, write all the information you gave them (name, e-mail address, password) on a paper somewhere and keep it in a safe place. You may forget someday or they may change the password without telling you and you will have to prove that you are you by giving the same info you gave when you signed up.

To use WS_FTP, all you have to do is select the files or folders on the left (which are on your computer) and click on the arrow in the middle which points to the window on the right. (See windows below). he window on the right shows the contents of the folders in the server at the hosting service. Notice "Local System" on the left says what's on the hard disk of the computer (C:) and the "Remote System" shows what is in the backstage folder of www.eabjm.com's server.

If you are doing it for the first time, the window on the right (the contents of your reserved space on the server) should be empty. Otherwise, it might have a temporary index file which you can (and should) erase or write over.

In the window on the left (the contents of your computer), find the folder called "demo_site" on the desktop of your computer. Open it by double clicking on it. Remember, this is the folder containing the finished site. Select all the folders and files. To do so, click once on the first file or folder, maintain the Shift key pressed and then click on the last file or folder in the list. All of them in between should be selected. You can let go of the Shift key now.

Then click on the button with the little arrow pointing to the right (->) between the two windows. If there are folders selected, it will ask you if you want all of their contents to be considered, too. Say yes. This magic little button then copies everything you have selected from your desktop to the folder on the server. What is happening is your site is actually being published on Internet. Exciting, isn't it?

And that's all there is to it.  Go to Internet, open your browser and type in your URL to visit your page. It is available instantaneously.

To consider: If you want to add pages later, select only the new or edited pages to upload. But remember, when you add a new page, you should also add a link to get to that page from your index page. As a result, you'll need to upload both the new page plus the modified index page with the new link.

What next?

Publishing is one thing, maintaining a site is another. Maintenance of a web site entails two things - troubleshooting and updating. Neither one is easy and both demand a lot of time.

Troubleshooting

Here are some of the most common things which need repairs once a site has been published:

• Broken links. A broken link is when you click on a text or an image hoping to get to a new page and a "404 Error" page pops up instead. This means that either the page is not where it is supposed to be or the name of the page is not the same as what the link says it is. Common causes of broken links are:

  1. You forgot to upload the page where the link arrives.

  2. The filename of the web page (or its extension) is different from what the link says it should be. Example: index.htm does not equal index.html

  3. Or the web page is not in the folder the link thinks it's in.

   

• Broken images. This happens when a web page is looking for an image to insert and it can't find it. The result is an "x" or a question mark or a torn page in place of the image. Common causes are:

  1. You forgot to upload the image.

  2. The filename of the image (or its extension) is different from what the
     <img src> tag says it should be. Example: image01.jpg does not equal image01.JPG, believe it or not.
     And, of course, image01.jpg does not equal image01.gif.

  3. Or the image file is not in the folder the web page thinks it's in. Oh, so that's why we learned how to read and write a URL!

Remedies for both of these are to go back to the version you have on your desktop and do a test run on a browser. The same problems should appear. Go back to your web page editor (in Word, for example) and redo the links or images which don't work.

If that still doesn't work, look at the HTML code for the places where the links or images are referred to and see if they match the filenames, extensions and folder emplacements of the actual files. Then, using an FTP program, hook up to your server and double check that all the files with problems are in the right place with the correct filenames on the server.

Make sure that when you are checking to see if something has been repaired, you refresh your browser by reloading the page. Some browsers stubbornly reload the same old page from your hard disk rather than looking for a new and improved one on the server. Digging through your browser options should reveal a checkbox you can tick to avoid such problems.

Once everything works, spread the word. Tell all your friends. Give everyone your URL. If you so desire, you can even register your site with search engines and indexes (Google, Yahoo, etc.) so that someone who does a search for your name or for the theme of your web site will find you.

Updating the Site

A web site is not very useful if it says it was last modified in March 2000 or if it has had the same spelling mistake for four months. Keeping your pages fresh keeps your site alive. There are two ways of updating a site.

• Overwriting. Edit the pages which need updating on the diskette using the web page editor, hook up to the server and publish the new pages over the old ones. This is easy and clean. This is how most people work. Such a procedure is a bit time-consuming for just a quick spelling error, though.

• Using FTP. If you just want to change a line or two quickly and you do not want to go through the whole process of opening the page, editing it in the WYSIWYG editor, saving it and then going to FTP, why not start with FTP directly? This requires a little guts and some basic knowledge of HTML code. If you are interested, read on. If not, you can skip to the bottom of the page. This second method is perfect for fixing a spelling error or a broken link (when you know exactly what and where the problem is in advance). Here's what you do:

  1. Connect to the server using your FTP program such as WS_FTP. In the window which displays the contents of the server, locate the file which needs changing.

  2. Click ONCE on the file to select it. (Clicking twice here sends it from the server to your computer!) Once it is selected, right-click on it to get the pop-down menu.

  3. Select Edit file. The file is opened in Notepad. It's now up to you to correct the spelling mistake or the broken link in the HTML code.

  4. Close Notepad and it will ask you if you would like to save the changes. When you click Yes, it automatically uploads the corrected file, replacing the old defective one. Visit the page on Internet to be sure the correction has been taken into account and to be sure you did not accidentally change some important tags while you were in there.

  5. Suggestion: Once you have visited the page and checked that it works, double click on the corrected file so that it does get sent to your computer (or use the left-pointing arrow between the two windows). This way you will have a copy of it, too and there will not be two versions of the same file, one defective and one corrected. If not, imagine this scenario: You forget that you have made the change only on the server, you open the defective file on your computer, add lots of neat stuff and upload the new version. You will have written over the corrected version, replacing it with a new page which still has the old defect. Very frustrating. This is a reminder of what I said earlier about the "first_site" folder that is now on your desktop. It should be a perfect copy of EXACTLY what is on line. Otherwise, things get messy - so practice good file management!

The End

This is the end of the course but hopefully it is a new beginning in your life. I hope Internet will change your life as much as it has mine. I'd like to close with a passage from the Java scriptures, book of Bill, chapters 11 to 17:

© 2012 A. Damon

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