Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

How do you edit your existing Web pages on a remote server?

A reader from India writes:

"I have purchased your book titled Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours which is very interesting and I have learnt many commands from that. Sir I have one problem. I have purchased some space for a website on the remote server. And I have designed my web site and once I got it launched from the system adminstrator. Now he has given me the user id and password for the SERVER (which is 250 Kilometers from me). The problem is I have changed my website files and I have uploaded these files on to the server using FTP. So to refresh what should I do in the sense what command should I use? Please send me the details"

Dave's Answer: If you're sure that the files that are now on the server are the newer files, and that they aren't what you see when you visit your Web site with a browser, then there are two possible problems you might be encountering:

You might have uploaded the files into the wrong place on the server. Most servers I've seen are set up so that there's a directory in your home directory called either public_html or html: files should be placed within that directory, not in your home directory. If that isn't right, check with your system administrator for information on exactly where the files should be saved.
The other possibility is that you are seeing a browser cache problem. To minimize network bandwidth, many browsers are configured to only get a copy of a given page / graphic once, then use the local saved copy for all future visits. This is not conducive to building new Web sites, obviously, so you should try to reload the page (use the 'reload' button) or go into the browser Preferences area and clear out / empty the cache.

I hope these help you travel down the path of Web nirvana. Good luck.

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Comments

What is the easiest way to take a dreamweaver static site and convert it to database or whatever necessary so my customers can edit their own sites--login to a CP and make changes

Posted by: Dennis Handa at November 17, 2007 2:02 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!