FTP question....?

Question

if you were a web developer how would you use an ftp?

Answer 1

First, select your FTP program. I have 3 - ws_ftp, Filezilla, and the Firefox add-on called FireFTP. (The last has come to be my favorite; the first was the one I learned on...)

Your "hosting company" gave you an FTP address, a userid, and a password, and any other REQUIRED SPECIAL (if any) FTP information for connection. Go into your FTP program and "set up an account." Name the account whatever you want, so's you can use it later without having to remember all this FTP hostname/userid/password stuff next time. Remember to check "remember password" if your hosting company gave you a password (I think it unlikely that they didn't).

When you set up the account, there should also be a tab where you define the "default local folder". This'll be the folder on your computer where you keep the files for your website. Type it in.

Then connect.

You'll see a pair of arrows. Now or in the future, you can transfer files by highlighting on oneside and clicking an arrow.

After a transfer, the list of files will be refreshed. You can also right-click a file on either side to view,delete,rename, etc.

After you're through, disconnect.

And so on.

Answer 2

First, as a web developer, I use plain old FTP only as a LAST resort.

Why?

When you log into your FTP account, your password is transmitted as PLAIN TEXT for any hacker with packet sniffing software to grab up.

Whenever possible, use SFTP instead, or at the very least, a secure shell over which you can inituate the connection to the FTP server and send your username/password info in an encrypted fashion.

Adobe/MacroMedia Dreamweaver has secure FTP features built-in, as does CuteFTP Pro.

As to the actual work-flow, I almost never manually upload/download files... instead, I have a local version of the Apache web server installed, and do all my testing on my own machine. Then, when everything works the way it should, I'll do a synchronization (typically, right in Dreamweaver) and all files on the remote "live" server that need to be refreshed are uploaded automatically.

There is also an option to delete remote files if they don't exist on the local machine. This will make the local and remote sites identical.

Finally, there is a feature in Dreamweaver called "cloaking", where you can render entire folders, and certain file types, invisible to the synchronization process. This way you can avoid uploading certain files that don't need to be on the public server.

For example, let's say your site contains some Flash. On your local machine, you store your Flash source code (.FLA files) in the same folder as the compiled Flash applications (the .SWF files). You set the .FLA files to be "cloaked" so that they don't get uploaded to the server.

Answer 3

Use ftp to upload your files to the hosting provider, where your website will reside. There are loads of free ftp programs available. Try SmartFtp. It is really easy to use.

You will need an ftp url provided by your host, then a username and password. FTP into port 21. That is a standard.

Once you successfully are logged in, you can then transfer your web files, images, code... to the host's web folders, which may be titles, public_html, httpfiles, or something like that depending on where you are hosted. If you need help with hosting, let me know.

Answer 4

to put content on my website, such as video , images, text scripts ...You name it it'll put it on website ..
The top free one
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/
over a 100,000 free open source scripts

Answer 5

Er ... to transfer files to a server.