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© 2003, 2004, 2005 Trinidadusa.net
WWW.TRINIDADUSA.NET:
Serving Trinidad, Walsenburg, Aguilar, Cokedale, Branson, Kim, Segundo, Weston, Stonewall, Cucahara, LaVeta, Gardner and most places in between!
The Web Publishing FAQ
Frequently asked questions about publishing Web pages on www.trinidadusa.net servers.
Getting Started
I have a dial-up account and want a home page. What do I do?
Call 859-5760 or email the system administrator. We'll set you up immediately.Your web address will be http://something.trinidadusa.net. You should let us know what you want something to be. It need not be the same as your username. It must be one word, letters and/or numbers only.
Then, using the same username and password you use to dial in, point your ftp client at ftp.trinidadusa.net and start uploading pages.
What's an ftp client? For that matter, what's ftp?
Ftp stands for File Transfer Protocol, which is a technology used to move files around the Internet. An FTP Client is a program which makes it easy to move files via ftp.The most-used Windows ftp client is WS_FTP. It works great, and its free. You can grab it from the download page. Read the docs that come with the program and you'll be uploading in no time.
How do I register a domain name?
Go to our Domain Name Search Page to see if the name you want is available. You'll also find a link to Internic's list of accredited registrars there, along with a bit of advice from us about how to choose one. If you're planning to have trinidadusa.net host your domain, well take care of this for you without charge, other than the actual registration fee.
How do I promote my site?
- Register your site with appropriate search engines:
- There are programs (some of which are free) that will help you do this. If you want to save money, download one and learn to use it.
- There are a number websites where you can interactively submit your site to search engines via your Web browser.
- There are companies that specialize in site promotion. Many are surprisingly inexpensive and do a good job. If you've recently registered a domain name, you've probably already recieved spam from some of them.
- Check out Search Engine World. Many resources, including online tools. A Robots.txt (see below) tutorial and a Robots.txt validator are here.
- For more, check out this long list of resources.
- Obvious but often overlooked: Don't forget to put your url and email address on your business cards, print ads, etc.
- Here is an excellent turtorial on search engines and how to make the most of them.
- Search engine spiders are constantly crawling our web server looking for content to index. Some of them look for a file called "robots.txt" and assume you don't want your site indexed if they don't find it. This file tells spiders which files to index and which not to. You should have a robots.txt file at the top level of your site. See Search Engine World. for a good tutorial on how to create this file.
- If your enterpise is located in Las Animas County, check out www.trinidadcolorado.net. This site is a local Web portal for the Trinidad, Colorado area which is heavily promoted. Your site can me hosted and promoted as part of trinidadcolorado.net. This is a good choice if your market is primarily local or regional.
How do I put a sign-up form on my page and get the information by email?
Here's the html code you need to do that:
<form action="http://www.trinidadusa.net/sendmail.php" method="post"> <input type="hidden" name="recipient" value="you@trinidadusa.net"> <input type="hidden" name="response_to" value="http://yoursite.trinidadusa.net/thanks.html"> ...rest of your form goes here.... </form>Replace you@trinidadusa.net with your real email address. Replace http://yoursite.trinidadusa.net/thanks.html with the full url of the page you want displayed after the form executes.
Do you maintain backups of my data?
We backup all data on our servers every 24 hours. Please note that we do this on a best-efforts basis, and take no responsibility and accept no liability for the existence and integrity of your data. Your data is your responsibility and yours alone, so make sure you have backups too.
Help! I don't know what to do next!
All the knowledge you need is easily found on the Internet. See the download page for links to useful online tutorials and refernce works,
Tech Stuff
What kind of Web servers are you running?
Apache on Linux. Here is a more detailed list of our software.
What scripting languages are supportted for dynamic content?
Perl, Python and Php4.
Can I use Server Side Includes?
Yes. SSI is supported for dynmaic content but not for executing programs on the server.
I have some Perl/Python cgi's written for a Windows server. Will they run on Linux?
Probably, with some tweaking. Here are some tips:Can I Telnet into the server?
- Paths like C:\path\to\webroot\yourfolder need to be changed to /var/www/html/yourfolder.
- Remember that Linux file paths are case-sensitive. "this.cgi", "This.cgi" and "this.CGI" are completely different files.
- The first line of a Perl cgi must be "#!/usr/bin/perl"
- The first line of a Python cgi must be "#!/usr/bin/python"
- If the script is to run from a cgi-bin directory, the file extension should be ".cgi".
- Line endings are the most common source of trouble. Windows uses a two-character line ending (carriage return, linefeed), while Linux gets along with just the linefeed. If you save changes on Windows using a primitive text editor like Notepad, the unused carriage returns will still be there and the server will see things like "myvar = somevalue\r" instead of "myvar = somevalue". The solution is to download a more full-featured text editor. NoteTabLite is nice---and free. See the download page.
- Don't forget to set the file permissions. Unix uses permissions, not file extensions, to decide what is or isn't executable. Chmod 0755 should do it. If your ftp client doesn't support chmod, give a call and we'll do it for you.
- Perl, Python, and Php all contain some system-specific features which my cause a problem if you're using them. Otherwise, 1-7 should get you going.
Sorry, no.
Will my Active Server Pages work?
No. Propietary Microsoft technologies do not run on Unix/Linux servers. Talk to Uncle Bill about it. Meanwhile, there is a utility called asp2php which reportedly does a nice job of converting .asp files to php. If you try it, let us know what kind of results you had.
I want to put my email address on my pages, but want to hide it from spam bots.
The best way hide email addresses from spam bots is by converting them into html escape sequences.
lonny@trinidadusa.netbecomes
lonny@tri nidadusa. netand
becomes
<a href="mailto:lonny@t rinidadus a.net"> lonny@tri nidadus a.net</a>These encoded strings will display perfectly using any web browser but to spam bots, which read the actual page source, they are just gibberish. One customer reports that the amount spam she receieves decreased by more than 50% when she did this.
Converting strings this way is not as hard as it looks. We provide this tool which makes it easy.
WWW.TRINIDADUSA.NET:
Serving Trinidad, Walsenburg, Aguilar, Cokedale, LaVeta, Gardner and most places in between!