As part of your Internet subscription, you have a directory on our server where you can put files. In your directory is a subdirectory named public_html for holding web documents. Any file you put in that subdirectory immediately becomes available on the web. Think of it as your own piece of web space. The complete name of that directory is:

/usr/home/yourid/public_html

/usr/home/thom/public_html

http://www.esva.net/~yourid/filename.ext

http://www.esva.net/~thom/news.html

http://www.esva.net/~thom/

If I have a file named index.html or index.htm, then that is what you get. Otherwise you'd get a listing of every file I have in my public_html directory and be able to select any of them. That's not too bad, since by definition anything in my public_html directory is publicly available, but it's probably not what you want. Since you'll probably have a preferred "starting page" anyway, you should name your starting page index.htm so that visitors to your web space get started properly.

Here's another reason to name your starting page index.htm. We have an automated process that runs every night looking for user web pages named index.htm or index.html. The ones it finds get listed on our Page of User Pages. So if you use that "magic filename", then your pages will automatically get linked into the rest of the World Wide Web within 24 hours. And since we get sweeped regularly by all the major indexes (Webcrawler, Lycos, Alta Vista, and so on), that means your pages will get indexed too.

With all that in mind, how do you go about copying a file from your system to your public_html directory on our server?

If you have a Macintosh, then you do it with the Fetch program. I know almost nothing about Fetch except that you use the "put" command to upload files, I think. If you have Windows you do it with the FTP program (FTP stands for File Transport Protocol), which I describe briefly here, and at more length in the red binder starting on page 2-29.

However you're doing it, you need to connect to our server. Tell FTP or Fetch to connect to ftp.esva.net and to log in with your user ID and password (the same password you use for email).

Once you are connected, in Windows FTP you'll be looking at a window with four boxes arranged in a square. The two on the left are your computer; the two on the right are our server. The two on the top are directories; the two on the bottom are files. Hence, the bottom right box is showing you files on our server.

You'll start out on our server either in your "main directory" or in your public_html subdirectory. If you see public_html listed in the top right box, you are in your main directory, so double-click the name public_html to open it.

Double-click as needed in the top left box to go to the directory on your system where your web pages are stored. You should see a list of your web pages in the bottom left box. Select a file or files in the bottom left box and click once on the "copy" button (or the "->" button, depending on which version of FTP you have) to copy it to our server.

That's it. You are now a web author.

Note to Windows 95 users: The FTP program we supply was written for Windows 3.1. This can cause a problem if you try to use long filenames. If you name a page (for example) "mywebpage.html", the FTP program will see it as "mywebp~1.htm" and will upload it under that name, which probably won't work. There are three possible solutions:

1. Rename the files back to the correct name after uploading them. This is a pain. After doing it once, you probably won't want to have to do it again.

2. Download and install a Windows 95 specific version of FTP that properly handles long filenames. This is the best long-term answer, especially if you really want to use long filenames.

3. Keep your filenames within the "8.3" limits that FTP handles properly. This is the easiest answer.

thom@esva.net