Uploading Your Blog Content to the Internet
This article aims to explain how you go about transferring content or files from your computer to your webhost’s server where it can be made publicly accessible on the World Wide Web.
How a webhost distinguishes your home page from every other page
Before we get into the details of uploading your website to your hosting space, it’s worth giving a bit of a background on how a home page gets found among every other page on your site. As has been mentioned previously in other articles, a blog can be considered a form of website, so the two terms have been used here interchangeably. When a request is sent to a website, and the user hasn’t specified the exact page of the site they wish to see, the website will look for some default home page file to process or display. This name of the default page is usually something like “index.html”, “index.asp”, “index.php”, “home.html”, “home.php” or something similar. The default page name(s) a webserver will go looking for may vary slightly between different web hosts. For example, web hosting provider “FutureQuest” looks for the following default file names: “index.shtml”, “index.shtm”, “index.html”, “index.htm”, “index.php”, “index.php4″, “index.php5″, “index.php3″, “index.cgi”. The term “index” with some file extension (e.g. “.asp”, “.php”, “.html” etcetera) is perhaps the most commonly used default amongst web hosts.
To demonstrate what’s just been said, let’s give a concrete example. If Barry comes along and types in http://www.madeupsite.com/, the server on which the site is hosted will probably look for a file named “index.x”, where “.x” represents one of the web host’s valid file extensions. This is because Barry has only specified the website he wishes to go to, but not the specific page on that site. If one of the default file possibilities is found; “index.html” for example, the page will be displayed. If none of the default file names that your web host is configured to search for are found, an error page is likely to be displayed. The second scenario is that Barry types in not only the domain name, but also qualifies it with a specific page name, for example, www.madeupsite.com/some_page.html. In this instance, the web server looks directly for the file “some_page.html” rather than the default “index.x” file name. If it finds “some_page.html”, it will display the page. If it doesn’t find it, you’ll see an error message, regardless of whether an “index.x” page exists on the web host or not. This is because in this instance Barry has explicitly specified that he wishes to view “some_page.html”, not just the default home page.
So what’s this all mean? It means the file name of whatever page you plan on using as your home page must conform to the home page naming standards of your web host. If you’re going to be using third party blogging software such as WordPress, you’re not going to have to worry about creating this file. This is because the blogging software file package should already contain a home page file. For WordPress users, this will be the file “index.php”.
FTP and what you need to know about it
The most commonly used method for uploading files to your webhost is to use what’s known as an “FTP Client”. When you purchased your web hosting space, you should have received an email from your hosting provider containing the FTP details which you’ll need in order to upload your files. This will include an FTP host name, username, password and possibly a port number if your web host does not use the default FTP port. If you haven’t received these details, consult your web host’s support centre. An example set of FTP details might be:
FTP Hostname: ftp://ftp.uberhost.com/
Username: jimbo
Password: purplemonkeydishwasher
FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol”, which in simple terms is a communications standard that allows files to be sent to and retrieved from a webserver. There are a number of both free and paid FTP client software options available. One of the most popular free FTP software packages is FileZilla. Using an FTP client to upload files to your web host is essentially just copying files from one folder on your computer to another folder on your web host’s computers. Programs like FileZilla even provide a familiar looking graphic file and folder directory, so you can see exactly what files are folders are on your computer and what files and folders are on your webhost’s computer.
Important: once you’ve connected to your webhost’s directory, you may see files and folders stored on the web host that you did not create. Often these directories contain important supporting files that are required for your site to operate. If for some reason you feel compelled to delete any of these files, consult your web host first to establish which files are critical to supporting your hosting package. As a standard, web hosts will often have already created a “www\” directory for you on the webserver. This is usually the directory that all your website files should be uploaded to.
Uploading your site using WordPress as an example
The best way to get an idea of what’s involved in uploading your website to the Internet is using an example. I’ve chosen WordPress as the example, simply because it’s the most widely used blogging software tools available and it’s free. Rather than write an entirely new tutorial, I’ve found what I consider to be a very good video demonstrating the uploading process which can be found here. Even if you don’t intend on using WordPress, this video still demonstrates the process of uploading your website files and the sort of installation steps you can expect to encounter using blogging software packages. WordPress also maintains comprehensive documentation in regards to installation and troubleshooting and has strong user community forums in the event that you run into any problems.
You may notice that this video contains an additional step that hasn’t been discussed in any detail, which is creating a new MySQL database on your web hosting space. All of the content you write for your blog using your blogging software package of choice and any configuration options must be stored in a database internally. How you go about creating a new database will differ between web hosts. Usually your web host will provide you with some form of control panel that allows you to administer database tasks such as creation and deletion of databases. With most web hosts, creating a new database should be a relatively simple process. Once you’ve created the database, you need not be concerned with how it is written to or read from, this is all handled through the blogging software package internally. All you’ll need to do is provide your blogging software with the name of the database, which can be seen in the demonstration video mentioned above. The blogging software then takes care of creating all the necessary database tables and internal structures so you don’t have to think about it.
If you’re using database driven blogging software like WordPress, having to upload files to your web host will be a one off event. When you want to write a new post, it’s done online through the blogging software’s administration panel, so you don’t have to concern yourself with manually uploading any more files or content to your web host. The only exception is in the event that a newer version of your blogging software gets released and you wish to upgrade to it. In this instance, you will most likely have to upload at least some specific files or folders to your webhost’s server again. The next article to come will discuss my “first impressions” of WordPress after using it as the blogging software tool of choice for this site.