Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture

Setting Up Pages
On The World Wide Web

Putting Your Stuff in Your Directory

Michael Levenston
Executive Director
City Farmer
(C) Copyright: City Farmer 1995

From your desktop you have to get your material into your Web server's machine. That meant for me from my home computer into UBC's machine. You can do this on the Mac by connecting to the Internet and using a program named Fetch.

Files on my Mac

But before uploading your files you must first get into your directory (a "folder" in Mac terminology) to set up a special directory where you can put your material.

Telnet is the software of choice for this. It allowed me to go into our cityfarm account and work with my directory as if I were at home on my own machine. However you must learn a peculiar language called UNIX. to do the job. (Get the book UNIX for Dummies.)

Here are some of the commands you need.

Once inside your main directory, the command ls will "list" the directories already there. Then you must mkdir public_html that is "make directory" plus the name of your new directory. Go out of Telnet and back to Fetch. You are now going to upload (send) your material.

Don't ignore these tips.

• None of your file names can have spaces in them.
• As you are about to upload files, delete either .bin or .txt from the name.
• For GIFs send them as Raw files from the Mac.

Once you've sent your files, use Telnet again to go into your directory. Type ls then cd public_html to "change directory" to your html material and then ls -l to list more details about your files. Finally type chmod a+r plus name of the file for each of your files. This will allow the outside world to read your material.

Files uploaded to UBC

What you have essentially done in the above is put your pages in a folder at your Web server and made them readable to those looking in from outside. Once you get the hang of it you can put up new pages using Fetch and Telnet in a matter of seconds. That's unbelievably quick when you consider that you are publishing to a world audience.

The Final Link

Finally your Web administrator will mysteriously link you to the rest of the world so that everyone will see the files in your directory. You will be presented with a special address, your URL, so that others can find you. Ours is http://unixg.ubc.ca:780/~cityfarm/index.html

Now you can be seen, by those who know about your site, from any place in the world with the appropriate Internet connection.

It's Never The End of Course

Sometimes your server will be down and no one will be able to access your pages. Ominous reasons for such occurrences include "forgot to start the 'daemon' that controls access to WWW homepages" which will leave you feeling helpless. However you can trust that these down times will be corrected and your pages will sail happily around the world.

And of course you have to keep writing new pages! This will keep your audience coming back for more. You will also have to be creative to let other people know that your pages are available. For instance you can post a note in an appropriate Usenet group, or send out a press release to magazines whose readers might be interested.

Setting Up Pages
On The World Wide Web

1. Why Do It?

2. Finding a Web Server

3. Learning HTML

4. Putting Your Stuff in Your Directory

5. For Windows Users

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