| Place your text here | Introduction File Transfer Protocol Frequently Asked Questions Server Specifics Your Site cgi-bin Policies Support Contacts |
Communities OnLine can provide your organization with a complete Internet presence, hosted on our servers and connected directly to a T3 Internet backbone. In choosing Communities OnLIne, you will benefit from the use of high-speed, reliable Internet connectivity while avoiding the labor-intensive network administration associated with maintaining your own active server on the Internet.
Our support team works around the clock to maintain the full-time availability of your site. Network monitoring programs backed up by live technitions monitor your server. Should a problem ever occur, these technitions work quickly to correct it, usually before you or your users even notice.
Being prepared for the unexpected, backups of all of your files are performed automatically each day, and are available to you should a disaster occur.
System and network security are high priorities in the maintenance of our Web Page servers.
Additional capabilities can be added to your site at any time. For example, if you currently provide information through the World Wide Web and would like to add audio sound, video, or to perform secure transactions for handling credit cards online, a single telephone call to your support representative can have these set up on your site in a matter of days.
File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, is the most commonly used application for moving files from one location across the Internet to another. If you have FTP privileges to your site, you can add or remove web pages or other data to and from your Web Site from anywhere, as long as you can get access to the Web.
Most of our users use an FTP client such as CuteFTP or WSFTP (on Windows95) or Fetch (Macintosh). There are many others available, and most of them will probably work fine. Here we will cover the basics of setting up your FTP client program so it will connect to your Web Site on the World Wide CommUnities OnLine server.
First you must have already down loaded and installed an FTP client onto your PC. Once you open it you will see a setup screen that will allow you to open, add, edit, or delete, an FTP site configuration. Below are sample answers you will be giving to the options requested by your FTP client.
TITLE : Some clients allow you to add a unique title to the site you are setting up. This may be anything that will remind you what type of site, or where this site is. Such as: MY SITE or WWCOL
HOST NAME : The Internet name of the host you wish to connect to. Such as: www.wwcol.com or wwcol.com/yoursite "Yoursite" would be replaced by the directory name used to establish your site.
TYPE : This field should usually be left with the default. ( UNIX and or STANDARD ) Since our server uses the Unix operating system.
USER ID : Your Log in name for your FTP access site. This may be different than the login name you use to gain access to the Internet. Any characters and / or numbers can be used for this. You provided this to us when we set up your site.
PASSWORD : This is the password for your FTP site. It allows only you to gain access to this site and make changes to it. Make sure your password is not too easy to figure out, and do not share it with anyone you cannot trust with your life.
ACCOUNT : This field will usually be left blank for our sites.
SAVE PASSWORD : check this option ONLY if you are sure you feel safely that no other person can get to your system. If you mark this option, anyone can use your system to make changes on your site because it has both your login and password automatically configured.
AUTO SAVE CONFIGURATION : This will save changes made to this FTP client program without you having to remember to do it yourself. If you do not select this, any site information you put into this form will be forgotten by the program once you exit. You will have to answer all these questions the next time you want to use it.
ANONYMOUS LOGIN : This attempts to connect to 'THIS CURRENT SITE " by using the login of anonymous, and your e-mail address as a password. This WILL NOT work on your site. DO NOT check this box. It will then use the login and password listed earlier for entry. Many Internet sites designed expressly for FTP downloads will allow anonymous logins, but for your safety and security reasons, we do not.
REMOTE HOST DIRECTORY : This is the exact location on the remote computer you wish to enter. Permissions which have been set up will limit where you can and cannot go. Usually an entry such as "/home " will do. The directory you enter into on the server can be changed once you are connected online. Make sue that you use all lower case characters in any Internet addresses. Very seldom will you find upper case characters used in a name, and names are case sensitive.
LOCAL DIRECTORY : This is the directory on your own PC that you will most often use for transferring and retrieving files. This directory can be changed once you are connected online.
While your FTP CLIENT may be a little different than that shown above, the information given should easily help you to configure any FTP CLIENT correctly and to connect to your site.
FTP FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Q. Should files be sent to my site in Binary or ASCII ?
A. Many FTP Clients have an ( Auto ) function default setting. While it will usually send files in the correct format, it is advised to practice sending files in the correct format by choice.
Binary: Files that are executable audio, video, or images. .exe , .gif , .jpg , .au and more.
ASCII: Files that are text. Scripts, or files that have extensions of: .txt , .pl , .cgi , .doc , .html and more.
Why ? Many files created in DOS or Windows, attaches a ( carriage return, and a line feed ) to the end of each line. These symbols cause errors on a Unix system. While HTML files will work in most cases without difficulty, and CGI scripts, or files that must be processed by the server MUST BE SENT ASCII so that these symbols will be removed during transfer to the server.
Q: After a few moments, I get a connection closed message on my FTP Client and it refuses to send files. Why is this, and what can I do ?
A: FTP Clients seem to have a built in activity clock. If it is not actually sending or receiving files it senses that there is no activity and automatically closes the connection. The only way to recover is to exit the FTP Client and start the FTP Client again. Your actual Internet connection should still be fine. Most FTP Clients do not allow you to change this time clock.
Q: When I send or receive a file, my FTP program shows me the time it completed the request, but the time is several hours off of the actual time in my area of the world.
A. FTP Clients are created in many countries. Internet Apps tend to read Green witch Village Mean Time as a reference. Many of the free downloads have the local difference from GMT built in and they will not allow you to change the way it interprets actual time of day. Your FTP client may show the time as 0400 am when you know it to be 1200 am. The time difference between GMT and your local time cannot usually be changed by you the user.
Q. I loaded some files over to my site but now I cannot open them. I can see they are there, but I get a 404 File not found type error.
A. Usually this is caused when you send a file and use a Capitol or upper case character in the filename. FTP Clients may still show it in all lower case, but in reality, the server knows it to be Capitalized. Just FTP into your site and rename the file being sure to type in all lower case characters.
World Wide Communities OnLine uses Apache as our WWW Server. This server is one of the earliest Web servers available on the Internet, and is one of the most widely used today. It was chosen for our Internet servers based on a combination of its features, performance and reliability, and the wide range of applications available for it. Apache is a proven and tried server that will stand up to even the most rigorous of applications.
Any HTML documents or /images you create must be placed within your own directory. From this starting point, you may create as simple or complex a document hierarchy as you like, limited only by the amount of your available disk space. Documents within this directory should have an .html extension to their filename by convention, and images are generally in the GIF, or JPEG, format. The default file or web page displayed when you go to a directory is index.html. If there is no index.html in the directory, the visiting browser will usually see a directory listing of your entire site. Even if you choose to name pages other than index, you should create a page and name it index.html to prevent viewing of all your files by visitors.
It is good practice to have a directory named images, or pics immediately within you main directory for placement of commonly used images. Items such as bullets, icons, lines, logos, and background gifs are easily accessed in this directory by specifying their locations as relative paths in your HTML documents, such as " /images/logo.gif." This helps you to more easily find these images months later when you create new pages and need to use them again.
The cgi-bin directory is the standard location for Common Gateway Interface conforming scripts or programs. Apache standard utilities, such as image map, as well as any software that is installed (i.e., a page counter) should be installed in this sub directory.
We have set up cgi-bin access for our clients in a way we can assure security and maintain proper functionality of the scripts. The scripts commonly used are for page counters, and form mail. Instructions on using these are below.FORM MAIL
Actual filename used by WWCOL is fm.pl (FM.PL)
World Wide Communities OnLine promotes " FAMILY SAFE " sites, and does not purposely allow any material which can be considered to be illegal, or immoral. Any information you place on your Internet server is done so solely at your discretion. CommUnities OnLine, as a matter of practice, does not review customer servers for content and assumes no responsibility for the material placed therein. However, should a site be brought to our attention that is not in accordance with our Family Safe guidelines, you will be contacted and requested to remove the materials, and or your site entirely.
CommUnities OnLine maintains regular backups of the files stored on your Internet server. Should loss of your data occur due to circumstances beyond your control, we will restore your files, as best we can, at no charge to you. Should loss of your data be due to improper use of the system or negligence on your part, and you request our assistance, CommUnities OnLine will charge for the restoration of your data.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please contact us by one of the following means.
| Voice Phone CommUnities OnLine | ( 407 ) 657-5663; | ||||
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