Once you have created one or more web pages in a public_html folder, you'll want to publish it, meaning that you copy the files to a computer which can act as a web server. A web server will allow anyone on the internet to see the files you publish in your folder on the web server, but only the files in a folder you create and name public_html. All they need to do is point their web browser to this URL (Uniform Resource Locator): http://personal.bgsu.edu/~zirbel (replace zirbel with your username!).
We need to distinguish between your local computer, the one you are physically touching, and the web server, which is likely to be a remote computer, one you cannot touch, but can only interact with over a network. On your local computer, you have created a folder called public_html in which you have various files, like .html and .jpg and .gif files:
To put a copy of this folder on the remote computer, you can use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. At BGSU, you can obtain WS_FTP from on campus for a PC, and that is what I'll use for this illustration. You might also want to download WinSCP, which you can find using google. On a Macintosh, there should be an application called Fetch that you can use.
After starting WS_FTP, you'll see a login page something like this:
The first time I access an FTP site, I use the New button to add a "profile" which will allow me to return to that site easily. WS_FTP comes with many preset sites, listed in alphabetical order. To make it easier to find sites I like, I assign names beginning with numbers, so they're at the top of the list.
With other FTP programs, there will be something similar. You need to tell it the name of the remote computer, personal.bgsu.edu in our case. This is called the Host Name in WS_FTP. You'll need your User ID or login name, and your password. I've checked the Save Pwd box, because I'm using WS_FTP on a computer that only I use. In BGSU computer labs, this option is not available (nor would it be good to have the program save your password). Then click OK.
Graphical FTP programs will present you with a window something like this. In the left pane is a listing of files on the local computer, while the right pane has a listing of files on the remote computer.
(WS_FTP didn't start me off in this folder on the local computer, I had to navigate to it.) To copy the public_html folder from the local computer to the remote one, you can click and drag it from the left pane to the right pane, or select it in the left pane and click the arrow between the panes that points to the right. Now WS_FTP will show something like this:
Once again, you can drag the public_html from the left pane into the right pane, and it will copy the files, overwriting all files. Unfortunately, many people manage to drag the public_html folder from the left pane INTO the public_html folder on the remote machine, creating a folder within a folder. Also, even if you delete files from the public_html folder on the local machine, they will still exist on the remote machine until you delete them. For this reason, I recommend RENAMING the public_html folder on the remote machine; select it, click the Rename button, and give it a name like public_html_2008-01-10. Because it is no longer called public_html, it will not be viewable from the Internet, but it will continue to exist as a backup of your web page. Once you've done the renaming, copy the public_html folder from the local machine to the remote machine. You can continue to do this until you have used up your total disk usage quota on the remote machine. By then, you'll be well beyond this simple introduction. (If you need to delete a folder on a remote machine using WS_FTP, first delete all files in the folder, then the folder itself. There is probably a way to avoid having to do this, but I don't happen to know.)
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Department of Mathematics and Statistics /
Math 592 /
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