Cognoscis

Now you’ve created a good site, maybe or maybe not, with the help of the previous post. Now if you made your site online at any of the sites I mentioned, It is already published and ready for business. But if you made it using Microsoft Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver, you will have to publish it online.

Using FTP with Microsoft FrontPage

Source: Acme Internet technical Support

Microsoft FrontPage supports two methods of publishing files to a web server:  HTTP POST and FTP (File Transfer Protocol).  HTTP POST is the default publishing feature in Microsoft FrontPage (using the PUBLISH button), and the preferred method for uploading your Microsoft FrontPage created web site.

However, under certain circumstances you may want to use Microsoft FrontPage to transfer a file via FTP.  You may need to use FTP for one of these reasons:

• The site you are uploading the file to does not support Microsoft FrontPage Server Extension-based publishing

• You are publishing a large file (over 1-2 megs) and are getting timeout errors publishing the file via Microsoft FrontPage publishing

To use Microsoft FrontPage to upload a web via FTP, perform the following steps:

1. Open your web in Microsoft FrontPage Explorer

2. Click FILE -> PUBLISH WEB

3. Type in the destination FTP Server name in the location box in the form of:
   ftp://ftp.yourdomain.com

4. Choose whether you wish to publish all pages, or only changed pages since your last publishing session

5. Click the PUBLISH button

6. Enter your FTP username and password when prompted

Also see the Microsoft Tutorial: Using FrontPage 2003 to Publish with FTP
http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC010405101033

THE BEST HOST???

The major question is, which is the best free host? Are there any absolutely free services available?

Well fortunately the answer is yes. There are quite a many services that are free. And what’s more, there are services for free WITHOUT ANY ADVERTS too. There are so many who claim to be that way, but the best I think is ByetHost. Most sites will recommend this service only to you. It’s free and advertisement free too. It comes with FTP support and it’s own uploader. Upload your files there and your site is ready to go.

In next webmasters post, we would be telling you about Widgets and where you can find them.

Website making is really a craze nowadays. And free website is a bigger craze amongst teenagers. Having a successful site is now a status symbol and every geek wants to do it. But the question is how? Can you make a decent website that stands out for free? Yes you can. Let’s get started.

Plan your Content

First you need to plan what’s your site is going to be about. Now I think that making a personal and random site with no topic orientation is useless. Your site needs to be on a certain topic. It may be small, it may be huge. Don’t think only popular topics will be a hit. The less popular the topic is, the more chance of YOUR making it popular . Choose a nice name, not like “Your name’s site” or something personal.

Designing a site

There are many ways to design a site. You can use Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver. To know how to build a site on Microsoft Frontpage, see the tutorial on the Microsoft site here. There are many other similar tutorials available online. But if you don’t have them, you will have to buy them. Alternately, you can use Yahoo! SiteBuilder. It’s free but I am not fond of using it. So here are the best sites I know to help you create your site easily in a few steps online.

1. NING- Create a social network for your community and friends.
2. YOLA- Easy to use online site builder with different modules and settings.
3. WEEBLY- Best online site creator I have used. Customizable and user friendly.

Some random tips

Explore the options of all three sited. Choose the one you like. Be sure to make it as extensive yet light as possible. If it becomes too heavy in size, it will take time to load and visitors will get irritated. Always use video sharing sites like Youtube and Metacafe to upload and share your videos so that you don’t have to sacrifice your own space on the server. Keep tutorials (video if possible), and make it complete with images and borders. It should catch eyes at the first chance. And remember to check if any of your link is broken or invalid. Most important is the quality of content.

Do you know any other good site builders? Please let us know. In the coming Webmasters post, we tell you about widgets, hosts, publishing, and other related stuff.

Many times in a bookstore, you think, “Alas! If only I had money to buy all those goody- goody books”. But never fear my dear, for Abhijit is here with yet another “Top sites” post. Now I cover the top websites to get your favourite books online in form of e-books for free.

Read Print- An awesome site with over 8,000 books by 3,500 authors like Agatha Christie, Julius Ceaser (Yes the same famous Julius Ceaser. I didn’t know he was an author too), Edgar Rice Burroughs, Karl Marx, O Henry, Robert Frost, William Shakespeare and many more. The site is simply awesome. It has quotes and books both available free for reading online. I never knew a better legal ebook site.

Manybooks.net – Browse through books by Authors, Titles, Categories and Languages and download them in multiple formats.

Classic Reader- A site containing most (infact ALL I could think of) English Classics as E-books. Books available only to read online.

Scribd- A site where users upload their documents of all types. They could be e-books, Reviews, Recipes, etc. Most books are downloadable in PDF format. Some are available to buy too. Note that the uploader may have no rights to upload the book. You can read online conveniently in full screen too.

Esnips- A website where people upload Graphics, Music, Videos and documents too. You can find most popular titles here. Search for it and search will categorize into different types. Here also, uploader may not have the rights to distribute it. Esnips Mobile is also available.

So, have fun reading mates.

Login2.me is a great web service where you can get login ID and passwords for accounts on sites you want to try or use only once and hence, don’t want to subscribe on. Just type in the URL of the site you want to log into and if it has any registered accounts for that site, it will show you.

It is FREE. There are no limits to the number of accounts you can get (if they are available, that is). There is a drag and drop bookmark which you can click when there’s a site which needs to be logged into. It includes nearly all famous sites like facebook.com, eminem.com, mobile9.com etc. and even those which do not require a login .

Yeah, that’s quite a problem. You get loads of fake accounts and accounts for fake websites and websites which do not require a login.  But you can report the non-working ones and get another. I have tried accounts for rapidHARE.com and blah.com and guess what? MULTIPLE results showed up. But don’t worry, there are loads of working accounts too.

Recently I have taken up learning online imaging. So you would be seeing some posts on that. I think everyone must be familiar with South Park cartoon. It’s a very hilarious cartoon in which 4 kids are shown stuck in between all the politics and trends of America. The Animation is all 2-D, but who cares. It’s AWESOME. If you live in India, try to catch it on Vh1 Channel (A part of MTV).  Even if you didn’t see it, use this to create funny characters. It’s fun.

So, intrigued by the different style of South Park characters, I thought to make one of my own. Thus, enter the SOUTH PARK STUDIO. It is a German site. It takes a few seconds to load on your PC. And then you can create create characters in a minute. It has a variety of options of all kinds. Hats, Hairstyles, eyes, skin colour, clothes, and even stuff like pets, musical instruments, shirt motifs, backgrounds, etc.

I started using it. And THAT WAS FUN!!! I made different characters for myself. I even made a group of 15 such characters to tag them as my friends on facebook. There is one small problem though. The “SAVE” option was not working in my case. So I used Printscreen button and pasted it in MS Paint (yeah! I still use it) and then chipped away useless portions.