Posting the pages

How it gets on the WWW.

When you have written a complete page you should save it in a folder that will become your offline mirror of the website. Until all the files referred to for graphics, styles and scripts are in place the page will not look correct when viewed in the browser.

Pages for the existing site.

If you are working on a page for the main website then duplicate the folders shown on the Structure page. This then needs to be populated with some working files including the style sheets, JavaScript and graphics used on every page or repeatedly throughout the site.

Ah. Now you can go ahead and download a ZIP file. Structure.zip - 237 KB. This file should be unzipped into a folder in "My Documents". It contains the whole LPMCC.net site structure but not all of the files. Just the necessary style sheets, JavaScript functions and common graphics. It also has a folder called "newsection", (not to be confused with "news") with a "standard.js" that will need to be altered to include navigation to your new files. Rename the "newsection" to something that reflects your section's subject and similarly start all the files with an appropriate word and underscore character "_" instead of "section_"

Your very own section.

On the other hand, if you want to have complete control over the posting of your section onto your own server and the responsibility of adding to it and updating it, then you will need to change the many links to the existing site from href="../folder/filename.htm" to href="https://www.lpmcc.net/folder/filename.htm" - hope you have a text editor with find and replace! Try Editpad.

It's OK for you. You're just beginning. I have to add links to your web pages on 500 files. Thank heavens the menus are JavaScript Includes.

Location for your section

You may already have free web space from your existing internet service provider (ISP). It may hold your own web pages or be waiting for you to add something. (Our family website is on PlusNet at www.smartark.co.uk) If your space is not used up you could create a folder to hold your section of LPMCC.net.

Most ISPs give free web space on their servers to host websites. PlusNet was chosen for the LPMCC.net site because thay give a whopping 250 megabytes. That seemed a lot when the site began but the huge number of photographs has already used over 40 megabytes. PlusNet also provide a lot of help for producing websites, domain name hosting, server side scripts and fast broadband connection. Click the link under the left menu to find out more.

I also subscribe on pay-as-you-go for email and webspace from Freeserve/Wanadoo and Tiscali. In the evenings they give an hour's use for 60p. I have a smash and grab mentality to being on-line so I guess I am paying less than a £1 a week for those accounts.

Onto the web

To put your pages onto the web they need to be transferred from your computer to the host server using File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

To do that you will need information from the ISP about the address, user name and password. For the main LPMCC.net website I am keeping that information close because I don't want anyone hacking into the site and because it also gives access to my emails. So anything for the main site, zip it up and email it to me. I will check they work in the correct position, the HTML syntax, spelling, give it the stamp of approval and post it on the site.

To transfer pages to your own website server there is a program free for home users called WS_FTP Lite Edition from Ipswitch. It is ideal for updating websites because you can just drag and drop files from your local folders onto the server space and only the out of date files will be replaced. It can also be set to change all file names to lower case.

Some (but not all) webspaces can be reached using the FTP capabilities of Internet Explorer. Here is the way to get to an example webspace called "mysite.myserver.net"

In the Internet Explorer navigation bar type : "ftp://username:password@mysite.myserver.net". This will produce a windows explorer type view of the website and you can drag and drop files between this window and a windows explorer view of your off-line version of the site. If you are not too worried about security on your computer bookmark the address to your favorites.