Jul 19 2008
One thing most web site owners have little time for is… anything! Anything other than focusing on their site content and the business or service it supports and the information it provides, that is. That means that administration often suffers, as it frequently must. Theres only so much time in the day. Continue Reading »
Jul 19 2008
Few things are less exciting than managing the disk space that always seems to be in too short a supply. But few things are more important to the health and well being of your site. Continue Reading »
Jul 18 2008
The choice of whether or not to try to administer your own web site brings with it a host, pun intended, of issues.
For most web site owners, the primary focus is naturally on creating, maintaining and enhancing the site. That often is just part of managing an entire business, for which the web site is just the means to an end. Continue Reading »
Jul 13 2008
Anything related to the Internet or computers is bound to introduce technical issues pretty soon. One of the earliest that novice web site owners encounter is FTP, which is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol. Seeing it spelled out, it’’s easy to see why those in the know quickly move to speaking in short hand.
The reason web site owners soon will (or need to) become familiar with FTP is obvious to anyone who has built a site on a remote server. You have to have some way of getting the files to the remote computer and FTP is one of the most common tools. It’’s also one of the simplest and most efficient.
FTP is composed of two parts: the client software and the server software. It’’s similar, in a way, to talking to someone on the phone who writes down everything you say. You (the client) make a request (”transfer this file to the server”) and the listener (the server) takes the request and acts on it.
That request to copy a file from a local computer to the remote one is carried out (often ”under the covers”) by a PUT command, as in PUT this there. You create the web page (in the form of a file) and then PUT the file on the server. To move a file in the opposite direction, from the remote server to your local computer, your client software issues a GET command.
Many FTP clients have graphical interfaces, similar to Windows Explorer, that allow you to drag-and-drop or otherwise copy the file without ever seeing the actual commands that carry it out. But it’’s helpful sometimes to know what goes on underneath. In tricky cases it can be an advantage to use a command line interface (in Windows, the ”DOS box”, with a similar interface familiar to most Linux users).
Knowing the commands and being able to use them in the command line form can sometimes help you diagnose what is going on when the graphical tools misbehave.
But FTP is not the only way to get a file from here to there. In fact, your browser moves files around from a remote computer to your local one all the time. In most cases, when you type in or click on a URL, what happens under the covers is in essence a file transfer process. The web page is transferred from the web server to your local computer then displayed by the browser.
Alternatively, you can sometimes even email a web page/file from your local computer to the remote server, then use an email client on the server itself to get the file and put it in a folder. That requires that you have some form of access to the remote computer. But there are many ways of doing that, such as in-built utilities in the operating system or using commercial remote control programs.
Those alternatives can be helpful to know in cases where the FTP file transfer process is misbehaving. Having more than one way to accomplish the task helps you diagnose what might be going wrong. It also helps you get the job done when the usual tools aren”t cooperating.
The more you learn about these sometimes puzzling acronyms, the easier you can accomplish your own goals.
The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
Jun 29 2008
Everyone likes to get something for free. But as the existence of spam shows, free isn”t always good. Sometimes, it’’s downright harmful. Deciding whether it’’s worth the cost to pay for hosting involves a number of complex considerations.
Hosting companies that offer free services obviously can”t stay in business from the money they make from you, since there isn”t any. So why do they offer free hosting and how do they make money? Why should you care, so long as you get yours? Because, in reality, there’’s a price of some kind for everything, even something that’’s free.
Free hosting may come from a company doing a promotion to attract business. They expect to demonstrate their value, then charge an existing customer base fees to make up for what they lost by the (short term) offer. It’’s in essence a form of advertising.
But free hosting is offered by lots of companies that are not dedicated to managing servers for websites. Google, Yahoo and thousands of others provide a modest amount of disk space and a domain name on a server for free. Users are free to do anything they like with it, though if the load becomes excessive you can be shut down.
That introduces one of the more obvious drawbacks to free hosting: resource limitations.
Typically free hosting offers a relatively small amount of space. That’’s often enough to host a few dozen pages. But an active site can quickly run out of room.
A more serious limitation is load.
Free hosting often places strict limitations on the allowed amount of bandwidth consumed. If you become a well-visited site, when users start banging away on the server, you can be asked to leave or simply be blocked for the rest of the month. Or, you may be permitted a certain quantity of total bandwidth use per month. Once it’’s reached, no one else can reach your site until the beginning of a new month.
At the same time, you will certainly be sharing equipment with thousands of other sites. Their load can affect your performance, prompting you to move. Migrating an established site brings with it a number of thorny issues that might be better avoided in the first place.
Free hosting has another potential downside: lack of support. When you pay for hosting you typically get, at least in theory, a certain level of support. Backups in case of disaster recovery from a hack or server failure, assistance in analyzing connection problems… the variety is endless. With free hosting you usually get none of that.
A company or site that offers free hosting will usually recover a disk or server that fails completely and you”ll be back up when they do. But if only selected portions of the drive fail, or you lose a few files through a virus attack or accidental deletion, you have to rely on backups to recover. A free service will usually come with no such option.
That may not be a problem if you have a small site. You can make copies of everything at another location and simply recover the site yourself - if you have the discipline to keep it current and the skills to make and restore the copy.
Free hosting will typically come with a few email addresses, intended to be used for administration and other tasks. But if your needs grow beyond that, you”ll need to seek another option. The email service also comes with minimal oversight. The server may be protected against spam attacks and provide virus scanning. But few free services will provide even minimal help with any issues that arise.
But the most serious limitation may have nothing to do with any technical issues. Free hosting services often require that your site’’s pages carry some form of advertising that pays the host, not you. That may be fine for you, or it may not. Individual circumstances vary.
On the other hand, if you”re just starting out, a free hosting option can be a great way to learn needed skills and a few of the potential pitfalls. You can set up a site, learn how to maintain and improve it, and not care too much if it gets hacked. Freely hosted sites can be a great platform for learning the ropes.
Free services don”t usually offer any of the features that an active, commercial site will need sooner or later. So if you plan to grow, it may be reasonable to get the free service for a while, knowing you”ll have to migrate when you become popular. But in the long run, you get what you pay for and you may need to pay for what you want.
How to Use the Internet to Advertise, Promote and Market Your Business or Web...
Jun 22 2008
If you are looking for good articles and resources on developing effective navigation systems and desining sites that work, there are a few sites where you can find such advice and some tools you can use for free:
Jun 20 2008
Not only blogging will give you hands on experience about being online, it is something you can start for free, as well.
Blogging is easy to do, there are free blog accounts in many places. You can start and test topics without spending any money.
Your effort will not be wasted, as you can channel the traffic from your blog to you site later. What’s more, you’ll be able to host the blog on site, when you build it. Blogger or WordPress, the two most popular systems, the last one is the most popular for site blogs.
Blogs are considered social media and have the advantage, for instance, of builiding RSS feeds for you. This lets you share your posts with other like minded people as they can subscribe to your feed easily.
If you want an example: this is a blog. Even established sites benefit from having a blog as the mean to convey brief news, short articles and other pieces of information.
Apr 24 2008
If you are considering building a web site all by yourself, you will definitely want to take a close look at HTML editors. Everyone knows that one can edit HTML with a simple tool like Notepad, however a more sophisticated editor is the secret to productivity. Some editors are as easy to use as a word processor and one can design and build a web page with little knowledge of HTML. You can start working while you learn.
A different concept that building a site one page at a time are blogs and Content Management Systems that let you build dynamic sites. You would not need them for a simple sales mini site, nevertheless, some are free and so easy to install that it is an option worth exploring. We will explore this in the near future.
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