What is it?
Freedom of the press is great ... if you own a printing press.
Recently, the copy machine has given almost everyone the ability to publish.
Even then, if you're going to do any mass communicating, you need a distribution
system, for example, a fleet of trucks. If you're filling those trucks with
paper, you need something larger than a copier. For starters, you need a lot of
money. The Buffalo News is putting in new presses that cost in the tens of
millions of dollars.
Those days are over. Now, the barrier to entry in the content
publishing industry is practically zero. One key component, the delivery truck,
so to speak, is free: FTP or File Transfer Protocol software. Learn more about
this protocol.
Skills
moving
files over networks
Upload files such as HTML text files and image files from
your desktop or laptop onto the Ricci Street server in North Carolina that will
serve them to any browser that requests them.
Download programs and other files from servers on
the Internet onto your desktop or laptop.
Tools
Netscape's Communicator has built-in uploading. FrontPage calls
it "publishing".
I highly recommend that you do your own file transfer
with an FTP client such as Ispwitch's WS_FTP-LE
5.08 rather than asking an HTML editor to do it for
you.
Version 5.08 is not the latest and greatest from Ipswitch. Nor
is it the fancy version that you have to pay for if you're going to be do
webmaking for a living; the LE stands for Limited Edition. However, this old
limited edition does everything you need to do because FTPing is a very simple
process, a brute transfer of files, nothing fancy required.
During installation, it will ask whether you are a student and thus
qualify for this free version.
Uploading and downloading via FTP are about as geeky as you need to get.
It's a simple interface with two panes (see
below).
Note | These screen shots show the color scheme I
selected from the Windows Screen Display properties Appearance options. Your
color scheme may well be different.
Getting Started
After installing WS_FTP, click on the blue FTP icon on
your desktop. It should have a little blue 95 or 32 near the top.
If it's not there, look for the ws_ftp.exe file in your Program
Files directory (see below) or wherever you downloaded / installed it. Right
click on the .exe file and select Create Shortcut. Drag the shortcut to your
desktop and from there to your Quick Launch bar if you want.
After you click on it, the software should open in the upper
left of your screen.
Setting up a profile
The dialog box above right should sit atop the two-pane
interface below. The Local System should display the contents of the C:\Program
Files\WS_FTP directory. The Remote Site should be blank.
The Session Properties box sitting atop it should be open to the
General tab and the Ipswitch profile.
Step 1. Click New.
Step 2: Give it any profile name you want. Mine says riccistreet.
Step 3: For Host Name, type riccistreet.net.
Step 4: Type in the User ID.
Step 5: Type in the Password.
Step 6: Check the Save Password box.
Step 7: Click Apply
If you click OK, the program will try to connect to Ricci
Street. It may take a moment or two for the remote directory information to
appear in the right pane. If you have your speakers on, you'll hear a
distinctive sound.
After you log onto the server, your local directories will show
in the left pane. The remote directories will show in the right pane. The screen
shot below shows what I see when I log onto Ricci Street. If you log onto the
Parkside Plaza directory, you'll see a list of MBA students' last names next to
the yellow folder icons.
If you're ok so far, click in the left pane to the folder where
you keep your copy of what's on the server. Click in the right pane to the
folder with your name on it.
Now you're ready to go. Highlight what you want to transfer in the left pane and
click the --> arrow.
Selecting one (or more) files or directories and clicking the
arrow will initiate the file transfer. From the remote to the local is downloading.
From the local to the remote is uploading.
Tip | To keep your relative URLs accurate and to make
FTP easier, always have a copy your Parkside Plaza web on your PC's or laptop's
hard drive.
After installing WS_FTP, click on the blue FTP icon on your
desktop. It should have a little blue 32 near the top.
Setting your options
WS_FTP lets you change almost every aspect of the display to
suit yourself.
Step 1: Click Options along the bottom.
Step 2: On the Sessions tab, click Save Current Folders as Connection Folders so
you won't have to do all that clicking again.
Step 3: On the Session (cont'd) tab, select Auto Detect
Step 3: Click the Extensions tab. (See screen shot below.)
Step 4: Type in .htm and click Add. Repeat for .html.
Step 4: Click OK.
When in doubt, it never hurts to transfer everything as binary,
but you may save a little time by transferring text files as ASCII.
This one-time procedure saves you from the cause of most
problems, transferring binary files as ASCII. Now the image files will go by the
default binary and only the text files by ASCII. If you start transferring other
text files such as style sheets (.css) and JavaScripts (.js), you might want to
add them to this extensions list.
Tip | Transfer text files such as .htm, html, .txt as
ASCII. Transfer image files such as .jpg and .gif as binary.
Connecting to the server
Step 1: Click on the WS_FTP shortcut icon you dragged onto
the desktop or attached to your screen's Quick Launch bar.
Step 2: Pull down the Profile menu to select your profile.
Step 3: Click Connect.
When you get there the first time, the window with the Remote
Site: will have a slash /. That means you're at the plaza root. Everything you
put in there will display with the URL beginning http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/.
The list of yellow folders below will have your name. Click on
it and you will be in your directory. Everything you put in there will display
with the URL beginning http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/yourname/.
I put the index.html file there. I highly recommend an
index.html file in this and every subdirectory.
I also recommend that you make an images directory and put all
your .gif and .jpg files in it. Click mkdir, type in images, and click OK. You
should see a yellow folder named images.
Tip | Make all file and directory names one-word,
lower case, so spaces, no caps, no exceptions.
Other than that, you're on your own except for the hosting company's rules of no smut and
no spam. Personally, I'll have a problem if you start stashing MP3s or video
files in there and I run out of storage space on the server. When in doubt, ask.
Transferring files to the server
WS_FTP gives you access to two hard drives, yours in the left
pane and the server's in the right pane. By clicking around, you can navigate to
the directory or folder on your hard drive where you have the mirror of your
web.
The two panes function the same, so just reverse these steps to
transfer files from the server to you.
Step 1: Navigate to the local and remote directories you
want.
Step 2: Click in the Local System pane to highlight the file to transfer.
Step 3: Click the --> arrow.
Geek Alert | While the file is transferring, note the
commands streaming past in the lower part of the WS_FTP screen. These are the
commands that WS_FTP is saving you from typing in by hand. Learn more.
Tip | After you have transferred a file from your
local mirror to your remote web, click Options | Session | Save Current Folders
as Connection Folders.
By following this tip, you won't have to click in the left pane
to get to your web every time you want to FTP. The result will be the ability to
publish to the Web in four clicks after you've saved the page, assuming you're
already online and have set up a profile:
Step 1: Click on a WS_FTP icon to start it.
Step 2: Click on OK to connect. It will open the connection to your local
version of the web in the left pane and to your server directory on the right
because of the tip above.
Step 3: In the left pane, click on the file(s) to transfer.
Step 4: Click on the arrow between the panes to transfer the file(s).
Bingo! You've re-published your page(s) about ten seconds after
you saved. That speed makes it easy to tinker and fix typos and respond to
comments.
Learn more
You'll find many WS_FTP tutorials on the Web. Using WS_FTP
to Manage Web Pages at Stanford's Computer Resource Center is clearly
written and has fast-loading screen shots.
Ipswitch, the British company that makes WS_FTP, sponsors a web
site called FTP Planet, which has a
beginner's guide and tutorial.
Geek Alert | After you've started using WS_FTP, you can
download software like Acrobat probably more quickly via FTP. The address may
well be listed under Adobe Systems in WS_FTP's list of Profile Names. If not,
the Host Name / Address is ftp.adobe.com. User ID and password are
"anonymous" (without the quotation marks). After you see Adobe's
directory in the Remote Site pane, click your way to pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/4.x
and download the file named ar405eng.exe. It is 5,762 K, so it will take ten or
fifteen minutes to download. Note that your download speed is far greater than
what you get through your browser. Why?
File Transfer Protocol
(FTP)
