Chapter 5: Publishing Your Web Pages

From NvuTutoriaWiki

The next step after creating and saving the web page is to publish it. Publishing a web page enables it to be viewed by others who know the URL (commonly know as web address) fo the web page using a web browser. If you are not familiar with the concept of publishing a web page, you should read the next section. Otherwise you can skip it and move on to the details of how to set Nvu's Site Manager to publish your web pages.

Contents 1 To Publish A Webpage 2 Site Manager 3 Publishing 4 Sample Text 5 Next

To Publish A Webpage

Publishing a web page means to upload the web page file to the web server. A web server is a computer which serves web pages to the users i.e. sends the web page file to your machine when you type-in the web address of the web page in the location bar of your browser and click on the "Go" button or hit "Enter". Hence in order to make your web pages viewable by other people browsing the web, you have to upload your web pages to the web server.

To publish your web pages to a web server you must have a login account on the machine running the web server. Normally, your internet service provider (ISP) gives you some web space when you sign-up with them. If you don't know the login details, you can find them either with the documentation that came with the internet connection or ask the ISP's help desk. Other options include paying a web hosting company to host your web pages or just find a free web hosting service on the internet. Free web hosting services generally keep a space on your web page for their own advertisements and/or only offer some basic functions for web hosting. You may want to look into paid services if you need more functionality.

Site Manager

Before publishing the web page to the web server, we need to tell Nvu where to publish the files. The Site Manager is the part of Nvu that manages your publishing information for one or more publishing sites. You need to create atleast one publishing site in the site manager to be able to publish your web pages.

To create an account in the site manager to publish your web pages you need to have the following information:

• Url of your website, e.g. http://www.mydomain.com/username
• Url of the FTP server, e.g. ftp://mydomain.com
• Username for your FTP account
• Password for your FTP account

To create an account for publishing your web site in Nvu's site manager, click on Edit > Publish Site Settings, which will open the Publish Settings dialog box shown in Fig 5.1. Fill in the information in the respective fields as shown in Fig 5.1. Site Name is just a convenient name used to distinguish the publishing site from other sites created in the Site Manager. Users should be careful while typing in the password, it is case sensitive and thus MyWebPass will be different from mywebpass.

Fig 5.1 Publish Settings dialog box

Publishing

Once you are done writing and formatting your page, you need to publish the page to the webserver. If you have followed the tutorial, you should have your publishing web site settings set in the site manager at this stage. If you haven't done that yet, please go back to the section Site Manager and create an account for your publishing web site.

To publish the page you have created in this tutorial, click on the Publish button in the composition toolbar. Clicking Publish button opens the Publish Page dialog box, Fig 5.2. Publish page dialog will use the default publishing web site account if you have configured more than one account. Choose the web site you want to publish to from the drop down menu. You can also change the title of the page if you want to, but that is generally not the case as we already have a logical title. The file name of the page being edited is also displayed automatically.

The Site Subdirectory for this Page: is an important field to fill in. For example, if you are publishing to a virtual server (when you have you website as http://username.domain.com/), your web host will usually create a directory of the same name i.e. username.domain.com in your home directory. Thus when you publish your files, you might have to put username.domain.com in the subdirectory field as the base publishing directory. In case you get an error when you try to publish your document, the site subdirectory is the most common cause of the error. Please ask the helpdesk people of your webhost for details or post in Nvu Forums for help.

Image:PublishPage.pngFig 5.2 Publish Page dialog box

If you have other files in your page, for example, images, video clips, etc., you should also publish them to your web site. To accomplish this select the check box for "Include images and other files". Its also advisable to use a site subdirectory to publish images and other files to keep your web site directory listing clean and manageable. However, you are hereby informed that Nvu allows to upload the linked images or files to only one subdirectory. This is not an ideal way to manage your web content. But as of now this is what Nvu offers us. If you have files (images, documents, pdf files, etc.) linked from different directories and want to keep the directory structure on your server, it is advisable to use a full featured FTP client like Filezilla.

To publish the page click the Publish button. It will open the Publishing dialog Fig 5.3, and will indicate the progress of the publishing process. Do not click Cancel, as it will terminate the publishing process before it is finished. After the page is published, the publishing dialog will close and you can continue using Nvu again.

Image:Publishing.pngFig 5.3 Publishing process dialog

Sample Text

Below is the sample text. Unformatted text is greyed out till it has been formatted during the course of the tutorial.

UNIQ4aae982d24ca69ec-HTMLCommentStrip1bf9751c5aa545d700000001

UNIQ4aae982d24ca69ec-HTMLCommentStrip1bf9751c5aa545d700000002

Next

We conclude this tutorial in the next chapter with links to further readings, and references about HTML, CSS, and web design in general.

©2004-2006 KDS Sahambi