When you upload through FTP, it is actually simpler, because what you are doing is just putting the photos where you want them. You know where you put them, or at least you will after you get the hang of it, so you don’t have to be given a code.

Here you are looking at your domain on your server. The domain is selected, so you can see all the folders and files within it. What you want to do is right-click in the bottom frame, select Create Directory, and name the new directory photos. Then right click again, create a new directory, and name it videos. I am using lower case letters intentionally. It can get confusing and easy to mess up if you mix them, so most people just use lower-case.

It will look like this.

Now click on the photos directory to select it. The contents will display below. It is empty.

We want to put an index page in there. Go to the domain directory on your computer where you put the blank index page you created in Notepad yesterday.

Upload it into your empty photos folder.

Do the same for your videos folder.

Now, let’s view that index page. How do we know what its URL is? Well, remember in a previous post where you learned that “Remote site:” is the directory you are in.

In this case the directory is displayed as

‘/example.help4flirts.com/photos’

Remember a url has to start with ‘http://’ to work. So we will have to add

‘http:/’ + ‘/example.help4flirts.com/photos’

to get

‘http://example.help4flirts.com/photos’

Do that with yours. Copy it into your browser and see what you get. If you have done everything right, you should get a blank page. If you get an error page, check to make sure the url starts with ‘http://’, two slashes, not one or 3. Start by viewing your domain, then add your /photo folder to it. The reason you see that blank page is because the browser always looks for an index page in a directory, if you did not tell it which file to look for.

Now view your videos index page in the same way.

You will also view your index.html pages in your photo and video directories by adding them to the end of the folder url. So if the folder is

‘http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos’

and we want to add

‘index.html’

to it, we just add them. But we have to put a slash between the folder and the file to show your browser that the folder holds the file.

‘http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos’ + ‘/’ + ‘index.html’
or
‘http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos/index.html’

It’s time to put a photo in my photo folder. I of course have some photos on my computer. Before you look below the screenshot, what is the photo URL? Check to verify by copying it into the address bar at the top of the page and viewing it.

The URL of the photo is

http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos/img0.jpg

I have put a video in the video folder. What is the video URL?

The URL of the video is

http://examples.help4flirts.com/videos/video.avi

One last example. What is the photo URL?

http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos/photo-sets/photos.jpg

When naming files or folders for the web, you should never use blank spaces. Use hyphens, underscores, or leave out the spaces.

Valid filenames: my_photo.jpg, my-photo.jpg, myphoto.jpg
Invalid filename: my photo.jpg

One last thing, how do you use the image? I have a code generator, but if you got through this, you are ready to do it yourself.

HTML tags start with a ‘<’ and end with a ‘>’. The image tag contains an ‘img src=’ which stands for ‘image, source equals’. That is telling the browser that the URL is next. Put the URL in quotes and here is the link for my first image:

<img src="http://examples.help4flirts.com/photos/img0.jpg">

I have two plugins I want you to install. Create a new folder in your Web Folders directory named Blogs, and in that create a folder named Plugins and another named Themes.

First you are going to download Bad Behavior, which is designed to block comment spam from spambots. The download you need will be found in the second paragraph, under the title Stable. The text is bad-behavior.2.0.38.zip. The link doesn’t work here because I want you to download it from their site. When you click to download in Firefox, you will be asked if you wish to save. Click yes. Then, right click the Bad Behavior download in the download popup list (not showing? Click Tools => Downloads to make the popup appear) and select Open containing folder from the menu. When it opens, the file will be highlighted. Right-click it and choose the option that says “extract to”. From the menu, select the Plugins directory in your new Blogs directory and accept.

Now, in Filezilla, find that Plugins Directory. Note that there is a bad behavior folder within a bad behavior folder. Click the outermost folder and you will be able to see its contents down below. It should look something like this:

Now click the Plugins directory.

Click the bad-behavior folder to select it.

Now look at the two frames in the right-hand side of your Filezilla window. When examples.help4flirts.com is selected in the top window, you can see your blog directories and files below.

Click the ‘+’ sign to the left of the domain name and the folders will display above.

Now click on wp-content in the top frame.

Click the ‘+’ sign next to it.

Click the plugins directory.

Now you can right-click the folder in the lower left-hand frame, select upload, and the entire bad behavior folder will upload into your plugins directory.

Next, I want you to download All-in-one SEOpack, which will help make your blog much more search engine friendly. The process is the same. Download, unzip, then upload into your plugins directory.

Let’s go set up these plugins. Select Plugins in your left-hand sidebar. You will now see Bad Behavior listed as one of your plugins. Click the activate link to the left of that plugin. There is also a Bad Behavior link in the Settings file, which you can visit if you are curious. You can wait on that, as it probably doesn’t need to be changed.

All in one SEO pack is going to be a little trickier to set up. Click the activate link next to the plugin on the plugins page. A red stripe will appear at the top of the plugins page telling you that you need to go to the admin page to enable and configure your plugin. Click the link in that message to go there.

Scroll down to plugin status. Select enabled.
Home title: pick the title you want to display in the blue strip across the top of the browser window. I have chosen “Homepage of WordPress demo blog.”
Home description: I have used “This blog is being used as a demo to go with the domain registration, hosting, wordpress setup, and file upload series of tutorials on my blog at http://help4flirts.com”.
Home keywords: Pick words that you want people to find your site for. I have selected “WordPress, installation demo, tutorials, hosting, domain registration, file uploads”.

That’s probably all you need at the moment. Scroll down to the bottom and update options.

I was going to show you how to install a new theme, if you don’t like the ones that came with your blog and find one out there you do like. But you already know how to do it. Download the theme and unzip it into a Themes directory you will create in the same Blog directory where your Plugin directory is. Then upload it into your Themes directory in your wp-content directory. It will automatically appear in the list of themes you have available to you on your Themes page you can get to by clicking the Themes link in the left-hand sidebar here.

A note about themes: some of them are tricky to set up. Some of them are tricky to use. Be prepared to give up and try something else if the first one doesn’t work for you.

Maybe tomorrow I can finish up the blog by having you write a new post. Then all we need to do is show you how to upload files.

It is super-easy to create a WordPress blog on a new domain using the one-click installer that comes with your Dreamhost account. It’s a lot harder to do once you’ve started to create folders and put files in them.

You can always add a blog later in a subdirectory, as in http://mydomain.com/blog. But if you want your site to be a WordPress site, as in http://mydomain.com displaying a blog, the best time to do it is right at the beginning.

A WordPress blog may seem hard to understand. The idea of managing a WordPress site may seem overwhelming. But it really is something you can learn to do for yourself so you won’t have to end up paying someone out of desperation to set you up.

So if you want to your site to be a WordPress site, I’ll show you how to do it now. If you want to just create an images or videos dirctory and start using it, with or without a homepage, I’ll show you that, too.

But before you can do either, you will need to install an FTP client on your computer.

Shop around. If you decide to go with Dreamhost, use this code: 6ZZIBMU2 and get a $50 discount.

Some girls do sightspeed, which has the annoying feature of making it really easy for a customer to record your cam within the program, so many avoid it.

I also know a few who use Paltalk, but the viewer has to pay for an account to watch, so that doesn’t work for too many.

I use a company called influxis.com. It’s a flash media host, which means that it hosts and streams your feed on flash, which is about the most common format there is nowadays.

I had looked at buying software to put in a video chatroom, but all of them cost a bundle (like $1000 for a real video chatroom), and then after you paid, you still had to get a flash media server.

With this one, you get a bundle of free chatroom and broadcast scripts that come configured for your website. So you do need a site to put the embed code on.

I was chatting with a guy on yahoo who wanted to show me his cam, but it froze up every couple of minutes. I sent him to one of my chatrooms, and the picture was perfect, no more freezeups.

Plans start at $10 a month and the cost is determined by how much bandwidth you use and how many simultaneous connections you want.

I’d like to say I’m getting a signup fee for saying this, but they don’t have an affiliate program for customers. Check it out if you have your own site. If you’re busy, it will more than pay for itself.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It’s a way of moving files from one computer to another computer over the web. It is a lot faster than downloading them through HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, which you access through links on regular html webpages. If I installed an FTP server on my computer, I could set you up an account and give you a username and password. You could then open your FTP client, go to the FTP address of my computer, log in, and download files from any directories that I had given you access to. I could choose to allow you to upload files, too.

In review…

The FTP server is the remote computer that hosts files for transfer. The FTP client is the software you use to get those files.

FTP for downloading purchased content

This is what happens when you buy content. The files are so large that it would take too long to transfer them just by clicking a link on a webpage, so they may set you up an account and let you download them that way.

My favorite FTP client is a free one, FTP995. It’s really easy to set up and use. I used to use Ipswitch, which I paid for, but I like this one better.

Edit to add: I haven’t used this one in a while. Lately I have used Filezilla client and FireFTP Firefox plugin.

The content company will give you their FTP address, your username, and your password. You just type that info in at the top. Click Connect, and you will go there and login.

Files will appear on the right and left side of the window. The ones on the right side are the remote computer. The ones on the left are your own computer. You need to decide where you want to put the content before downloading it. The top listing on the left is just directories and folders. Double click on a directory to find a subdirectory. Right click on a directory to create a new directory. If you are new to this and don’t have a directory where you put your photos, I recommend going to My Pictures and creating a new Content directory there. If you have bought photos of more than one model, create a new subdirectory within that for each new model, and within that for each set. Double-click the folder at the top with two dots next to it (which represents the directory you are in) to move back up a level.

When you reach the place where you want to download to and are all set, right-click the file on the right you want to download and select ‘download’ from the menu. Then wait. When it’s done, it will appear in the location on the left.

I know it seems like a pain, but it would be a nightmare later to straighten out if you get everything mixed up.

They will have the files zipped when you download. If double-clicking on the file icon doesn’t open it, this company also has a free unzip utility.
Software995

FTP for creating and managing websites

I know a lot of people who realize the need for a website find the idea of constructing one and putting it online to be somewhere between daunting and downright scary. It looks like there are so many things that can go wrong that if you make the wrong mistake you could inadvertently start World War III or cause the end of civilization as we know it.

Many webhosts capitalize on newbie fear by providing sitebuilders and a variety ways of getting a page online without having to use ftp. Most of them are very limiting. You will never learn how to run a website properly while using a setup like that. But the worst part is that when you start needing more services, they charge outrageous prices for them. It rapidly adds up to far more than the cost of a real web host, and you may not even be able to take your site with you when you do make the move. You’ll have to create a new one.

It’s not rocket science. It’s not even hard after you’ve done it like once. It’s just a different way of thinking that you may not be accustomed to. So let’s look at FTP.

Again, you install the FTP client software. Your webhost has given you the FTP address you need, your FTP username and password. Fill it in and connect. Then all you have to do is right-click a file on the left to select the ‘Upload’ option to upload it to your domain on the right.

Call your first html page index.html or index.htm. Upload it and this is what will show when somebody types your domain name in. Call your other pages whatever you want to and link to them from your index page.

Images? Videos? Recordings? Create an ‘Images’, ‘Videos’, or ‘Recordings’ directory and upload to it.

You can even re-download something you accidentally deleted or forgot where you put it on your computer.

Once again here I’m going to put in a plug for the freedom you get when you can host images on your own site and manage them as you please.

Even if all you want is to make a blog right now, putting it on your own website is a smart move. You can still drop blogs around here and there, so long as you’re staying within the tos of the free blog hosts. But for the blog that represents you, you’re putting a lot of work in on it. It should be yours, to do with as you wish.

If you’re going to put that much work in on it, you should have the option of making it a real site.

So here’s the story I’d like to relate to you. I spent much of this weekend installing a new website for a girlfriend who previously had a bunch of very strange pages created by a customer who knew nothing about web design or adult web design for PSO. Those pages were not only ugly in a 1992 sort of way, but they didn’t work right. You’d have to click a button several times to get a “mouseover” to work so the photo would show, instead of a large blank space. It was kind of a maze to get to her existing blogs, which were stuck with the default wordpress theme.

So I replaced the entry page with a really pretty one, the main page with one that links directly to her new blogs. Drop dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. And the blogs are very pretty, too.

Unfortunately, due to her choice of server, there were several problems that needed to be worked out. We never were able to change one of her settings, which would be necessary to get maximum indexing for her blogs.

But the big deal is that she selected this host because it looked like it would be good for a beginner. They had some kind of site builder, an uploader of sorts, and some other cool stuff that no longer works for her because her new computer has Vista. And the stuff she thought was going to save her time and money? While it made it harder (read: more work) for me, the biggest problem was making the blogs work right.

After a discussion on the forums:

Things could have been worse. At least she had apache/linux hosting. If she had chosen Windows hosting, as many “starter webhosts” offer, she would have had to move to another server to do what she wanted. You don’t want a Windows server. Just take my word for it.

If you have to pay somebody to install a blog for you, that’s an hour’s work, if nothing goes wrong. If there’s a problem, it can take several hours for somebody who knows what they’re doing to sort out the issue and fix it.

The problem is that when you pick a free wordpress theme, you may be getting something highly standard, or you may be getting something that seemed like a good idea at the time to the designer. Fixing a misbehaving theme can be a real pain. And none of this should be necessary, because if you choose a webhost that has simplified installation for wordpress, you click and you are ready. You are provided with a large number of themes that are ready to use. Dreamhost has “One click” installs for wordpress blogs and lots of other popular installations. On the rare occasions when I had issues, it was from upgrading very old blogs, and they went out of their way to fix them for me.

If my girlfriend had had to pay me for the time I spent straightening out her blog issues, she’d be out of money right now. The little bit of convenience back at the beginning that saved her doing research and asking for help would have ended up costing her a load of money in the end.

For those of you who are still nervous about what it means to use FTP to upload files and images to your website, I’ll be writing a little tutorial on that shortly. It has to be little. It’s a lot simpler than you could ever imagine.