Floyd: Building and maintaining a site

This is a primer text of how to build and maintain a web site. Definitely boring reading if you already know how to do it...

HTML and other files

Most important part first... a web site starts as an empty directory. Then you put a file, called index.html into the directory. This is the default name of the file always, in any system. It might be different if the site administrator has so configured.

In the Floyd system, however, the start file is index.html.

This file tells the web browser what the page should look like. It contains instructions, such as what the title is, what text goes on the page, what the background should look like and what graphics to display. It also has links to other pages and other places.

You could write your HTML files by yourself, directly coding in HTML language which is not too complicated... or you can use special software, such as HotDog or FrontPage 98 or even Microsoft Word (and then you would use the "Save as HTML..." option).

In any case, eventually you'll have some HTML files, probably some JPG or GIF images and perhaps even AVI or MPG movie files...

How to get the files onto the web site

When the site was created, a login name and a password were also created. With HotDog, you would now configure a "remote access" telling HotDog that you want to be able to save your files to a web server using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For FTP you need to use your login name and password. As you get access, you will see a directory called public_html -- this is where you need to put the index.html (and other files).

The simplest way to show this might be to take a command line FTP as an example (some less relevant lines have been deleted):

FTP> open otala.com
Connected to otala.com.
220 srv2.otala.com ..... ready.
Name: totala
331 Password required for totala.
Password: SecretPassword
230 User totala logged in.
FTP> dir
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root    public_html -> /home/httpd/otala.com/
FTP> cd public_html
250 CWD command successful.
FTP> dir
-rw-r--r--  totala floyd    index.html
FTP> get index.html
226 Transfer complete.
FTP> quit
221 Goodbye.

This little snippet was all about logging in (using FTP) to otala.com, seeing the public_html link, following it to the web directory, then seeing the index.html file and downloading it into your PC/Mac.
The command get gets files, while put puts files... but you guessed that?