Lesson 4:

Uploading Your Web Page to a Server

What's a "server," anyway?

If you have completed lesson 1 and have played around with lesson 2 and lesson 3 a bit, you should have a web page in the works. But a web page is only accessible to other folks surfing the web if you upload the file to a server, which is a computer connected to the Internet that "serves" web pages to you when you (as a "user") surf the web, looking for web sites. Server access then is obviously very important: it's what allows an HTML file to really become a web page that can be accessed by everyone else on the world wide web.
Getting server access at EMU has recently become a lot easier. Anyone with a "my.emich" account can also have an account on people.emich.edu. This page explains how to set up your people.emich.edu account and how to upload and download files from it.

Getting your people.emich.edu account

Assuming you have an active my.emich.edu account (and if you are an active student at EMU, you probably have such an account), setting up your people.emich.edu account is extremely easy:

Go to the web page people.emich.edu and click on the link that says "Activating your people.emich.edu account is easy.
Log in and follow the instructions. Seriously, that's it.
Your web page address will be http://people.emich.edu/username where "username" is your username (as in "skrause"). Your login and password for your people.emich.edu account is the same as my.emich.edu account. Note that there is no "www" with this address!

Uploading and downloading files to and from your people.emich.edu account

The people.emich.edu server uses "secure file transfer protocol," which is slightly different from "file transfer protocol" and chances are, you will have to download some software to make this work. Fortunately, the software is free and easy to use.

The people.emich.edu instruction page provides the links for the free sftp software you can use and it offers some other options if you're interested in pursing them. You can use an file transfer software that supports sftp, but EMU provides some links to some free versions. For the Apple computer, EMU recommends a software called Fugu, but I personally would recommend cyberduck.

But chances are, most of you have a Windows-based PC at home, and EMU recommends FileZilla. You can download FileZilla and get more information about it from the FileZilla Wiki, but you can also download it from EMU directly. Here's how it works:

From the people.emich.edu instruction page, click on the link called "customized Secure Shell Suite," which is in the pa graph about managing your site. This link will download "setup.exe" to your computer.

Keep in mind that where it downloads on your computer will depend on how you save it. But what you should see is an icon that looks something like it does in the window below (without the giant red arrow and word "HERE!" pointing at it, of course):

Double-click on the "setup" icon. This will very quickly install the software on your PC.
To launch "FileZilla," look under the "Start" menu, select the category "programs," look for the directory "EMU SSH Suite," and select "FileZilla (SFTP)." You could also do a "find..." command and search for "FileZilla." It should something like this:

Don't worry about the program "PuTTY;" if you don't know what SSH is, you don't need it.

After you launch "FileZilla," you should get a screen that looks like this:

Notice here that the "Host" is people.emich.edu, the "Servertype" is "SFTP using SSH2" (these two things should be pre-set with the version of FileZilla you download from people.emich.edu), and the "User" is your username, which is the same thing that you use for the my.emich sustem too (skrause, in this case).

Click on connect, and you will then be promoted to enter in your password (again, the same as the my.emich password) in a different window, like this:

Your password won't show up. Click "OK."

This will open the main window for working with FileZilla, which looks like this:

Now, the window on the left side (the one labeled "Local Files") is on your computer. In this case, this indicates what's in the folder "Web Page," which is in the "Documents" folder for the user "Steve Krause" and on the "C" drive. This is one of the many reasons why it is critical that you understand where you save files on your computer and how to create subdirectories on your computer. The window on the right indicates what is on the server. In this example, you see that there are several subdirectories (such as "howtohtml," which is where this web page is located) in this window; when you first set up your web site, the right window will only contain the directory titled "..," and this is a directory that you should ignore.

To upload a file to people.emich.edu from your computer, select the file in the left window (your computer) and drag it into the right window (the server). You should see some indication of the process of this move in the window on the bottom of the screen.

To download a file from people.emich.edu to your computer, do just the opposite: select the file in the right window (the server) and drag it into the left window (your computer). Be sure to note what directory you are in on your computer.

It's that simple.
If these instructions don't make that much sense, there are a couple of other resources. For example, there are these instructions put together by my colleague Steve Benninghoff. And there are these instructions for FileZilla on the people.emich.edu server, too.

Two last things!

First, keep in mind that the space you have available on people.emich.edu is limited to 20MBs (I think) of data. While this is more than adequate for the simple web pages we'll be doing for this class and probably beyond, it is a limit that means you can't have hundreds of photos, quicktime movies, and mp3s on your site.

Second, once you get comfortable working with your people.emich.edu account, you can also use it to move and store files that you use. For example, instead of emailing yourself a MS Word file, you can upload it to your people.emich.edu account, which would allow you to access it from home, school, or anywhere else you can use sftp software.

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