HyperDispatch
(Jan/Feb 1999)

Campus Computing Symposium 1999
Student Technology Survey
Year 2000 Update
Microsoft Training on Campus
Borland Software Site Licences
An Applet a Day
Virtual Network Computing Software
Sun SITE Digital Collections
Digital Library Applications
Lab for Biological Sciences
Virtual Museum
Canadian Census Data Project
GPU in Computer Labs
Plotting Word Files on the DesignJet
Publishing FrontPage Webs on the CNS Web Server
Working with GPU Files and Directories

Publishing FrontPage Webs on the CNS Web Server

Vaughn Bowler (vaughn.bowler@ualberta.ca)
CNS Client Services

MS FrontPage 98 comes with Microsoft's Personal Web Server, which allows you to host your websites on your networked desktop computer. This is all well and good, but it also means that you need a robust desktop computer, that you have to leave the computer on all the time, and that you must share your computer's processing power between website hosting and all the other processes that occur on your machine on a daily basis. If you consider your web pages to be mission-critical, the Personal Web Server's non-dedicated web hosting service could present a situation in which access to your web pages is inferior to the level of service provided by the industrial strength Unix web servers operated by CNS.

However, FrontPage 98 includes an easy-to-use Web Publishing Wizard that lets you easily transfer your microcomputer-based websites to the CNS web server complex. This means that you can continue to use FrontPage's powerful HTML editing and website maintenance features, while letting the dedicated CNS web server complex handle the chores of web hosting.

The Web Publishing Wizard transfers your website files to the public_html directory under your CNS Computing ID a lot faster than a standalone FTP program can. When you're finished publishing, in effect you have a production version of your website on the CNS web server and a backup copy on your desktop machine. If you subsequently make changes to your website, you can re-publish the material, and the wizard is smart enough to only update changed pages. Please note that you may lose some of the Microsoft-specific functionality that FrontPage websites provide, such as full-text searching of your pages, but for the majority of basic websites the following web publishing procedure is recommended.

To move your FrontPage website to the CNS web server complex:

  1. Open the FrontPage web you want to publish.
  2. Choose Publish FrontPage Web from the File menu and the Publish screen appears.
  3. Type in the URL where you want to publish the website, as in:

    http://www.ualberta.ca/~your-CNS-Computing-ID/public_html/MyWeb

    (Note: The directory "MyWeb" will be created by the wizard if it doesn't already exist, and will be overwritten if it does exist.)

  4. Click OK and the Microsoft Web Publishing Wizard appears. You are asked to type in the name of an FTP Server. Type:

    gpu.srv.ualberta.ca

  5. You are asked to type in a Directory Path. Enter:

    ~your-CNS-Computing-ID/public_html/MyWeb

  6. Click the Next button and you are asked to supply a Username. Type in:

    your-CNS-Computing-ID

  7. You are asked to give a password. Enter the password for you CNS Computing ID and click the Finish button.

You should now see a message about verification of the FTP connection, and then you'll see a status bar showing the progress of the files being transferred to your public_html directory.