Computer as a file system
The computer is organized as a file system. If you
are using a notebook or PC, you can click on the
"MyComputer" icon, to go to the next level of the
file system. Then you can click on "C:\ drive"
to go to the disk drive called C drive, and so on.
Therefore you are always at a certain node of the
file system, which conceptually looks like a tree
structure. If you want to copy a page (a file) from
one node of a file system to another node of
another file system, you need to be able to
identify that node, and then use some tool to
do the copying. The FTP tool serves that purpose.
When you complete the copying, you will then
make the page (file) visible to the outside world
by providing its URL to the public. So the
URL is like the address of this page (file).
The above document describes how to publish your page by
first uploading your page using WS_FTP. If you are
using WINSCD the procedure is similar. The key points
are as follows: The host name should be ftp.pitt.edu.
(If you are uploading to a different host, you need
to find the corresponding host name.)
Depending upon the FTP tool you use, you will be
prompted to enter login name and password in
some text box.
Then you must upload your page under the public/html directory.
So you need to first find the public directory and
change to this directory. Under the public directory
there should be the html directory. If the html directory
does not exist you need to make a directory called
"html". Then you can change to html directory. Now
you can upload your page under public/html directory.
Suppose you make another directory "cs134" under the
public/html directory and upload pagename.html under
public/html/cs134. The URL will be:
URL - http://www.pitt.edu/~username/cs134/pagename.html