New User Guide
| General Information | Special Web Servers | CGI Programs |
This is an introductory guide for new users of Catalog.Com. We are continually working on adding information for new users. If you think something is missing please send us a note.
The first thing you need to do to set up a web site is to create your content. These would be files containing text, graphics, and sounds. You will need to learn how to write html, a simple language that describes how web browsers format pages and define hyperlinks. The NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML provides a good starting point. You can also find programs that can generate html for you, but if you want to do any advanced page design you should probably at least know how to make simple modifications to your html pages.
The easiest way to start doing this is on your own computer. All you need to get started is a simple text editor or word processor, and a web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer. Your web browser can be instructed to load local files from your disk instead of needing to be connected to the net, so you can do most of your editing and testing locally.
A simple way to start learning html is to copy pages that are similar
to the layout you want to use, and then edit their content to be your
own. When browsing other web sites, you can use the View
Source or similar browser command to see the html code that is
displaying the current page.
Our server runs Unix, which uses case-sensitive file names. This means that a file named Apple.html is not the same as a file named APPLE.HTML. It is especially important to remember this when you are creating links or including images in your documents, since the wrong case will result in a broken link.
We generally suggest that you enter all your href filenames in lowercase, and upload and store them on our server in lowercase. You normally would name your html files with an extension of ".html", but if you are using Windows you can also use ".htm". For JPEG encoded pictures you can use ".jpg" instead of ".jpeg". We do not allow spaces and other strange characters to be used in filenames so we suggest you stick to letters, numbers, dots, dashes and underscores.
You can create a hierarchy of subdirectories on our server to match the way you want to organize your files. We strongly suggest that you name your opening home page index.html or index.htm or index.vs. If our server is accessed and the URL contains a directory name but no filename, it will search for a file named index.html, index.htm, index.vs, Welcome.html, welcome.html, Welcome.htm, or welcome.htm. You should not have more than one of these files (eg: a file named index.html and a file named welcome.html) as we cannot guarantee which filename will take precedence. If you do not have a file with one of these names, and your account is accessed through a URL without a filename, a listing of the files in your directory will be displayed.
Once you have created your html pages and content you will need to upload them to your catalog.com account. You can only do this using a program that understands how to make an FTP transfer. See our instructions on how to use FTP. There is one important thing to remember when using FTP, and that is to set the proper mode before you upload your files to catalog.com. Setting the proper mode will let FTP take care of translating file differences between our Unix server and your Mac or PC. You need to set ASCII (sometimes called TEXT) mode when transferring html files, configuration files, and log files. You would use BINARY (or RAW) mode when transferring graphics, sounds, and program archives.
Some HTML editors, such as Microsoft's Frontpage, include automatic web publishing. These editors use the FTP protocol to transfer files to our system.
Your URL is the name used to access your web site. It consists of a
domain name identifying the computer the pages are on, a directory
path, and a file name. We also set up domain names with the subdomain names
of ftp and www. If your account is named test
then you will be able to use the URLs:
http://www.catalog.com/test/
http://ftp.catalog.com/test/
http://catalog.com/test/
If you did not create an
index.html file or one of the other default file names, then the server will display a directory listing of
all your files. If you did create an index.html file, then the
server will display that instead. So using the URL
http://www.catalog.com/test/ is equivalent to
http://www.catalog.com/test/index.html.
If you have our virtual host service, then your URL can be specified as
http://www.catalog.com/youraccountname/
http://www.yourdomain.com/
http://ftp.yourdomain.com/
http://yourdomain.com/
Listing your site in search engines is one of the best ways to build traffic to your site. Here are a few good places to announce your new home page:
If you don't want your site to be indexed by web harvesting robots, you must place a robots.txt file in your directory. Details on the format of the file are available at http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/norobots.html
Catalog.com maintains a directory of our customers sites. If you would like your site to be included in the directory, you can add it through the Web Site Manager.
The Web Site Manager lets you configure and modify a number of features related to your web site, reports and logs. It includes a file manager, which lets you view and edit html documents, create and delete files, change file protections, and other assorted functions, via a simple form interface.
By default, all files you upload to catalog.com are set to be readable by anyone. Files need to be setup this way so that our web server can retrieve them from your directory. Anyone who can view your files with a web browser can also download and copy them, so generally this is not a problem. The default protection also allows anonymous FTP users to see a directory listing of your area. If you do not want anonymous FTP users to be able to do this, you can use the File Manager to turn it off. Turning off anonymous FTP directory listings does not affect web service.
If you need to change other protections, you can do it with the file manager or through an advanced FTP command.
Reports on access statistics to your account will by default be emailed to you weekly and monthly, along with a copy of your final bill. You can set how often they are emailed to you, where to email them, and a few other things through the Web Site Manager.