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How to Edit Your Web Page

You can get started right away with our Quick & Dirty Page Editor. You'll probably want something better before long, but the online editor is great for experimenting while you're learning and for making quick changes even after you're a pro.
A World-Wide-Web (WWW) page is just a text file with special instructions embedded within it for how it should be displayed. You can edit it using any editor you want, as long as you save the file in plain ASCII text.
We'll set up your first home page for you. It will be very plain, and fairly useless. You'll want to start editing right away. As explained under Your Default Filename, the filename of your home page will be index.html, and it will be located in your home directory.
Everyone who browses the web can read your home page file. That's pretty much the point of it. However, only you (and the sysops in an emergency) can also edit your home page file. How? You copy it to your local computer, make changes, then upload it back to your Home Directory. You can put any files you want in your directory.
Let's say you just got your new home page, and you want to edit it. Here are the steps you'd follow:

You'd use FTP to connect to the www.sff.net web server,
Download the page file to your computer,
Make a local backup copy before making any changes(!),
Edit the file,
Use FTP again to upload the changed file to the to www.sff.net.

What editing program should I use?
Since a web page is just ASCII text, you can use any simple plain-text editor such as DOS's EDIT, or Windows' NOTEPAD. Many people who've learned a little about HTML coding find this is the fastest and cleanest way to edit web pages.
But what if you don't think in binary, and can't stomach the thought of writing your HTML documents using EDIT or NOTEPAD? There are lots of commercial (as well as shareware and freeware) HTML authoring systems out there on the Net, including those that are part of current office suites like Microsoft Office, Corel WordPerfect, etc. Our web server doesn't care HOW you create your page. Use any editor you want.
People who learn best out of books might try HTML for Dummies or one of the many other HTML guides on the market.
Naming Restrictions

You are not limited to DOS's 8.3 convention, either in your file names or your subdirectory names. Here are some examples of perfectly legal filenames:
myfirststory.text
my favorite story
stry.txt
bartholemew.went.to.town.and.bought.a.hat
novelflat.jpg

That said, it's still probably a good idea to stay away from using spaces in your file names. Even though they are legal here, many web-browsers don't know how to handle them. The underscore ("_") is the industry-standard substitute for the space character; thus, my_favorite_story.txt instead of my favorite story.txt.
Try to use commonly-accepted filename extensions (.txt, .doc, etc.) for files you offer up as links. This will help the caller's web-browser know how to present the file to the caller. Avoid files without extensions at all, too, for the same reason.
You may create as many subdirectories under your home directory as you need. Use FTP's MKDIR command to make subdirectories.
Using FTP
You upload and download files to your Home Directory on the server www.sff.net using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). As the name suggests, FTP is just a set of rules on how to transfer files. The actual program you use to transfer files is called an FTP Client.
There are many types of commericial, freeware and shareware FTP Clients available (see our list of suggested FTP clients). For example, versions of Windows since WFWG 3.11 have included a very simple command-line client called FTP Many web browsers have FTP clients built-in that will allow you download files from an FTP server, however very few are able to use user authentication (to allow you to use your SFF username/password) and to write files to a server, both of are necessary for web page editing.
The instructions below are written as if you're using the Windows command-line client, however, the steps are very much the same regardless of what FTP Client you actually use. You'll need to adapt these steps to your chosen client.
Quick example of how to use the built-in Windows ftp client to download (GET) or upload (PUT) a web page.

Click Start Button->Run and enter FTP as the name of the program to run and click OK (you can also do this from a DOS prompt - type FTP[enter]). A blank FTP window should come up with an ftp> prompt.

Type in: open www.sff.net[enter] You'll see a response like this:
    Connected to www.sff.net.
    220 circle Microsoft FTP Service (Version 4.0).
    User (www.sff.net:(none)):

Enter your SFFNet username and password. When you're correctly logged in, you'll see:
    230-Welcome to SFF Net!
    230-
    230 User _____ logged in.

Type in the change directory command (cd) to change to your Home Directory:     cd /www/people/HomeDirectory[enter]

Use either the ls or dir command to show the contents of the directory. ls shows you the directory contents in UNIX format, dir shows you in DOS format.
    dir[enter]

IMPORTANT - Set your file transfer mode. Use ASCII (asc[enter]) for text files or Binary (bin[enter]) for everything else. If you use a file transfer mode that doesn't match your actual file type, your file will be garbled during transmission. Use:
    asc[enter] for html or any kind of text; and use
    bin[enter] for everything else.

Transfer your file using the GET or PUT commands.
For example, if you want to download your default index.html text file to the TEMP directory on your hard drive, you'd enter:
    lcd c:\temp[enter]
    asc[enter]
    get index.html[enter]

If you want to upload your default index.html text file from your TEMP directory to the web server, you'd enter:
    lcd c:\temp[enter]
    cd /people/HomeDirectory[enter]
    asc[enter]
    put index.html[enter]

After the file has transferring, you'll see a message like:
    200 PORT command successful.
    150 Opening ASCII data connection for index.html(89482 bytes).
    226 Transfer complete.
    89482 bytes in 13.52 seconds (6.62 Kbytes/sec)

When you're ready to disconnect, enter:
    bye[enter]

Other FTP Commands
To see a list of available FTP commands:
    help[enter]
To move back up a directory level:
    cd ..[enter]
To make a new directory:
    mkdir NewDirectoryName[enter]
To change to a different directory on your local computer:
    lcd DirectoryName[enter]
Making Backups
You might want to keep backups of your files. There's usually room on the server for this. Use FTP's COPY or CP commands to make backup copies of your files.
For example, let's say you want to make a backup copy of your index.html file. Type:
    cp index.html index.bak[enter]
This will make a backup copy called index.bak. Naming your backup copies with the .BAK extension prevents them from being indexed by most web indexers/crawlers so people won't end up at your backup file by mistake.
HTML Verification Software/Services
It's a very good idea to verify that your web pages are free of syntax errors and can be read correctly by different browsers. Fortunately, there are a number of very fine online and offline programs available that provide this service. Here's a list that you might find helpful.

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