Instructions on uploading content to your public_html folder

There are two common ways you could upload content (html files, image files etc.) to your public_html folder. I’ll discuss them both. Please go through this document while trying to remember how we approached this in class.

1.  When you are on UMSL campus.

  1. When you are on campus, all you would have to do is go to “My Computer” and then double click on the drive that mentions your SSO ID and says “K:” as part of its name.
  2. When you go to your K: drive, you should see a folder named “public_html”
  3. All your web content which is ready to be online should go in this folder. For example, if you were working on home work 1 and I told you to create a folder called “hw1” then you would in essence put the hw1 folder under the public_html folder.
  4. K:/public_html/hw1 (is how it should be put). In other words,
  5. K: drive will contain public_html folder
  6. public_html folder will contain hw1 folder
  7. hw1 folder will contain images folder
  8. That is it. Now you have “uploaded” your content to the server and should be able to access it online via http://www.umsl.edu/~joshik/hw1 (replace my SSO ID joshik with yours – and please don’t forget to put the tilde: “~” )

2.  When you are NOT on UMSL campus

When you are not on campus, you would not have access to your K: drive directly. But we can use “SSH Secure File Transfer Protocol” to actually connect to the server at UMSL and interact with the K: drive in much the same way as we would interact with it locally i.e. when we are on campus.

a.  SSH Secure File Transfer Protocol

Official Download Site:http://ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh/

I.  Click on the above link or copy & paste it in your browsers address bar.

II.  You will be taken to a page with links to many different file types. Click on "SSHSecureShellClient-3.2.9.exe" to download the installer file.

III.  Once downloaded, double click on the file icon to begin installation.

IV.  Follow the on-screen instructions to finish install.

V.  Once installed, open the Secure FTP program from the start menu.

VI.  Click on Quick Connect –

VII.  Put in your host name as admiral.umsl.edu,

VIII.  Put in your user name (SSO ID) as the user name

IX.  Leave the port number as “22”

X.  Put in your password (the same one you use on-campus to log in to any computer)

XI.  NOTE: IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME CONNECTING TO THE SERVER FROM A MACHINE THEN SECURE FTP PROGRAM MAY GIVE YOU A SECURITY WARNING SAYING THAT YOU ARE “CONNECTING TO THE SERVER FROM THIS MACHINE FOR THE FIRST TIME” : JUST SAY CLICK ON YES or OK.

XII.  You should see the K: drive on the right hand side. Something like in the picture below.

XIII.  NOW double click to get into the public_html folder and this is where you would put all the content. E.g. the folder “hw1” would go here.

XIV.  In other words, the left side of the program is your local computer and the right side is the remote computer (a server in this case)

XV.  Just like burning music where you can drag and drop songs to the right… you can drag and drop files from the left to the right and vice versa.

XVI.  NOW LOOKING AT THIS TRY TO REMEMBER WHAT I SHOWED YOU IN CLASS. ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS PUT THE FOLDER ON THE RIGHT OR CREATE A FOLDER ON THE RIGHT AND THEN PUT IN THE FILES AS SHOWN ABOVE.

XVII.  Later, you can do the same thing with hw2, hw3 and so on… REMEMBER… all you are doing through this FTP program is connecting to your K: drive and transferring files back and forth. If you were on campus you wouldn’t need FTP. Especially since, as we discussed in class, all your web site files (html, and image files) need to be in the “public_html” folder, and the public_html folder is on the K: drive, you would have to connect to K: drive some way.

I hope these instructions help. Good Luck.