FTP

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Uploading to Your Site
Binary vs. ASCII Mode

Uploading to Your Site

There are a number of ways to upload your pages to your site. Your choice may be dictated by the host you select, or by your own personal preferences.

1. A common way is to use an FTP program such as WS/FTP or CuteFTP.

2. Some hosts provide a web-based method for uploading. They will provide you with the URL of a page where you'll fill out a form and submit it, and their software will upload your pages. Beware: These methods may cause extra coding to be added.

3. Some browsers or editors such as FrontPage may provide a publish tool that's similar to an FTP program. Beware: Some of these will rearrange your code in ways you may not like.

If you use an FTP program or publishing tool, you'll have to enter some configuration information the first time you use it to upload to a new site. You'll have to provide a name that is used to access your site (your host will provide you with this), and you'll have to indicate the type of system your host uses (your host will hopefully provide you with everything you need).

I use WS/FTP myself, and don't have any experience with anything else. So I can only share my experiences with WS/FTP.

WS/FTP uses two little windows to show two directory contents: the directory on your hard drive that you're uploading from, and the directory on your web site that you're copying to. It provides capabilities such as creating new directories, copying individual files, copying entire directories, renaming and deleting files, etc. It provides these facilities both on your hard drive and in your server directories, and you can copy files either direction.

You'll want to spend some time investigating the various program options. For example, WS/FTP provides an option of forcing all file names to lowercase as you upload — you don't want to use that option if you're referring to file names with uppercase characters!

Some people encounter a problem with their FTP program translating file names to uppercase when they're transmitted. To avoid this problem, you might want to use lower-case names exclusively, and use the "force file names to lowercase" option.

Binary vs. ASCII Mode

You need to distinguish whether files are sent in ascii or binary format. Text files such as HTML files need to be sent in ascii format. On a PC, these files have a carriage return and a line feed at the end of each line. Other systems use just one or the other. When you transfer in ascii format, the FTP program takes care of fixing these little things for you. But when you want to upload a file such as an image file or sound file, you don't want the FTP program to monkey around with stuff like that. When you send in binary format, the files are transferred exactly as is.

With WS/FTP and many other FTP programs, you can choose ascii, binary or automatic. Automatic looks at the set of suffixes you set up to determine which types need to be transferred as ascii files. You will want to set it up so that .htm, .html, .txt, .js and .css files are sent as ascii. (You may need to add to this list over time as you learn to use additional types.)

For WS-FTP, you choose automatic mode by selecting a checkbox:

Use the "options" button to set up the file types for automatic detection. When you click on the "options" button, the following window pops up:

In the extensions tab, specify which file types are to be sent in ascii mode. All other types are sent in binary.

To add an extension, type it into the box next to the "add" button and then click on the "add" button.