How to FTP (or transfer) Your Homepage to Our Server

IN GENERAL

For your page to be accessible to the world it must be located on a computer that is turned on and available 24 hours a day to the rest of the Internet. Our W3 server is one such machine, and the idea is that you create your web pages on your computer, then transfer them to goldinc so that anyone on the Web can access them.

The process for Macs or PCs is essentially the same; the interface is just slightly different.

Basically, you transfer a file using File Transfer Protocal (FTP). One application that will perform that function for Mac users is called Fetch, which will be explained after describing a generic FTP session, which will be explained after a session using Microsoft Windows and Netscape 2.0b6 (or later).

PC using Netscape and MS Windows

Using the latest copy of the Netscape Navigator and the Windows File Manager, transferring files to/from the goldinc W3 Server is as easy as dragging an icon. Here's what you do: Using the Netscape Navigator, enter the location ftp://username@ftp.goldinc.com/home/username/public_html where username is your goldinc username. If your goldinc username is "joe", for instance, you would reference the URL ftp://joe@ftp.goldinc.com/home/joe/public_html

When Navigator connects to ftp.goldinc.com, it will attempt to login as user "joe", which is a password-protected account. Navigator detects this and prompts you for the password. Note that you could have connected using a URL of the form ftp://joe:password@ftp.goldinc.com/
but anyone watching over your shoulder would have seen your password (and it would have been written to your History list, etc.)

After you enter your password at the prompt provided by Navigator, the contents of your public_html directory will be displayed.

Now, switch out of Navigator and bring up the File Manager so that the two programs are displayed side by side. To transfer a file to your public_html directory, simply drag the icon of the file from a File Manager window and onto the Navigator window. As you do this, your cursor's icon will have a tiny "+" sign, meaning that you're about to "add" a file. When the cursor is completely over the Navigator Window, let go of the mouse button, thereby "dropping" the file into place. Navigator takes care of the details of transferring the file to goldinc.

Getting files from your goldinc user account is similarly easy, but in this case you'll be dragging file icons from the Navigator Window and "dropping" them onto a File Manager window. This "drag and drop" feature of the Windows '95 Netscape Navigator has also recently appeared in the other flavors of the program. Try it using your copy of Navigator 2.x

PC using FTP

Using any FTP application, you select "ftp.goldinc.com" as your host (if not preset) and then enter your username and password. That should automatically take you to your home directory. Check the top of the screen under "remote host" to see what directory you are in. It should be "/home/username". Under that should be a directory called "public_html". If you open (click on) that directory there should be a document called "index.html", which is the generic home page provided for you when you opened your account.

Choose the file you want to upload by clicking on the file name (on the "local computer" side of the screen) and then click on the right pointing arrow in the center of the window to transfer the document from your computer ("local host") to our computer ("remote host").

Hopefully that worked and you should go to Netscape and enjoy the view.

MAC using FETCH

Using Fetch, you type "ftp.goldinc.com" as your host (if not preset) and then enter your userid and password. That should automatically take you to your home directory. Upon arrival you will want to select (click on) the "public_html" directory/folder. If you open that folder there should be a document called "index.html", which is the generic home page provided for you when you opened your account.

To upload a file, you want to choose "Put File" (that is, put your file on our server) and you will then have a box open allowing you to select the document that you have created. When the correct document is in the box, please make sure it is named "index.html" and PLEASE NOTE, when you are transferring images be sure you have "Raw Data" aka "binary" aka "image" selected as your format. If not the transferred files could be unusable.

And just use the reverse steps to "Get" something from our server to your machine.

That's it for transfer using the index.html as an example. In general you will also want to keep all the components of your home page in the same directory, but you can create directories within public_html for organization a complex site.

So go ahead and make yourself look great!

And if you continue to have problems, just give us call. If you still you can't follow the discussion, maybe you should consider signing up for one of our beginner classes.