FTP, uploading etc. - SciForums.com

Stryder

08-13-04, 07:57 AM

When working with HTML and HREF/SRC locations (URLS or images) you have to understand how they are written.

There are two types, Relative and [/b]Absolute[/b].

Relative as the name sake suggests, is where the location is relative to the position of the page you're coding it to. for instance:

/public_html
/logs
/logs/log.html
/images
/images/test.gif
index.html

above is a example layout of how your website might be, you might have a public_html folder where your index.html page exists and a few other folders like images and logs.

Firstly, most servers will set your public_html folder as your root folder. This means folders below that should not be viewable by the public through the server.

[Note: public_html is used with webspace providers that have multiple users, single user webspaces that people purchase might not have one and even on occasion the multiple user webspaces might not. However all will have a root folder which folders below it in heirarchy can't be seen by the public.]

Now dealing with generating a Relative image link that points to an image (in this case test.gif) you would write the anchor as < IMG SRC="images/test.gif" >.

This broken down is saying "From root goto the images folder and load test.gif with what ever the servers MIME type is. (Mime types are set by the server to identify what format a file is in by it's extension. Your home PC will have something similar running too, however using the server one it can work out if the image in this case should be treated like a downloadable/served file or if it should be parsed by the servers configuration and show as an image.)

Another Relative Example would be if /logs/log.html wants to create either a view of the test.gif image or a link back to index.

< HREF="../index.html" > would be used in log.html to point to index, notice it uses .. to "drop" down a folder level. Theses ..'s can actually be stacked for multiple folder levels... ../../../index.html etc.

< IMG SRC="../images/test.gif" > would get the image to show from the log.html page, notice that first .. drops down a folder, then the images folder is choosed with finally the file test.gif.

An Absolute path, is the relative path plus the servers domain information, if you domain was www.foo.bar, the image tag would be < IMG SRC="http://www.foo.bar/images/test.gif" > notice that the domain opens straight into the root folder.

[Note: Most servers are setup to use index.htm or index.html as a page that exists in the root folder that is the first to be Indexed. Index pages go back to the older structure of networks and protocols like Archie and Gophers. As an Index suggests, they were used to identify a sites overall contents on one page to allow the sites to be "Spidered".]

FTP
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Ftp is File transfer protocol, it's basically another server setup to deal with file transfers to a folder on a different port to that of HTTP. (HTTP is the protocol used to show you most webpages and resides on port 80, where FTP runs on port 21. They do open up other ports, since they "Listen" on the ports mentioned, and when they are accessed they open up other ports to do the data transfers so that the mention ports can go back to listening for other connections.)

You can get FTP programs to shift files/alter/update about, even Internet Explorer has the capacity of working with the FTP protocol (although some people prefer not to use it).

[Note: FTP uses a plain text transfer of login data, which means it's not secure to packet sniffers (This is where Hackers could listen in to your data flow and Identify your login information if they know how to). If you want security for file transfers then you would be looking at either using an FTP server with an SSL tunnel or using an SSH server to tunnel both a commandline interface with the server and file transfers.]

It is possible to get .com domains and a package from a webspace provider to allow you to have access to an FTP server to upload files, perhaps even their own brand of logging information about who views your page.

You should note thought to check out the history of your provider, Alot of defacements of websites in the past have been down to the provider being circumnavigated security wise and allowing the Hacker to gain access to all websites served by it.

(This overall post probably contains too much information and written badly but hopefully you'll get the jist of what you ask. I'm sure others will happily post their favourite webspace providers, domain registrars and FTP programs etc)