Comcation Business Center - Doing Business on the Internet

To FTP into Comcat's servers, you will need a FTP program. If you are using Windows 95/98 you can use the program WS_FTP, if you are using a MAC you can use the free program Fetch.

Using the FTP program, you connect to the Comcation servers, and copy files from your computer to the server, called Uploading, or copy files from the server to your computer, called Downloading.

The server you want to connect to is ftp.comcat.com and use your normal username and password.

To use either FTP program, refer to our Support section on configuring WS_FTP, or Fetch.

To TELNET into Comcat's server, you will need a TELNET program. If you are using Window 95/98/NT, it already has a TELNET program built in. To access this built-in TELNET program, Click on your Start button, then Run. Simply type "telnet" in the box (without quotes). If you are using MAC, you can download a TELNET program here.

With the TELNET program you will need to connect to the Comcat server. The host name for the server is shell7.comcat.com. You will use your normal username and password to connect.

Once connected you are presented with a prompt similar to a DOS type atmosphere. Here is a list of the most common and important commands in unix:

Command:	Description:
ls	list contents of a directory
cd dirname	change directory
rm [filename]	remove file, files
mkdir [dirname]	make a directory
mv [filename] [destination]	move
cp [filename] [destination]	copy
pico [filename]	standard editor
pine	standard email utility

I uploaded my web site, but I still see "This web page will be coming soon!".

The Coming Soon page is a page that is placed on your site by Comcat by default as soon as it is setup.

The name of the Coming Soon file is 'index.html'. That is the default filename that all browsers look for first when loading a web site. When uploading your pages, you want to be sure that your first page or main page is named 'index.html or index.htm' and that you either replace the one that was originally there or manually delete it.

The first page of your web site should be named 'index.html' or 'index.htm'. This is because every browser automatically looks for the index.html or index.htm file first whenever it loads a web site.

When you connect to the server, you are initially in your 'home' directory. All of your web files are to be stored in your 'public_html' directory. You can create and delete directories as you wish in this directory. When your files are in the public_html directory, there is no need to reference that directory in your URL. (ie the URL is not http://www.yourdomain.com/public_html it is still simply http://www.yourdomain.com)

General Information for Perl scripts:

(1) The location of Perl on our servers is: /usr/local/bin/perl
(2) The location of sendmail on our servers is: /usr/lib/sendmail

To run your own cgi programs, please follow the procedure
below:

(1) Call the script file "whatever.cgi". The server will only execute
user cgi's which have a ".cgi" filename extension.

(2) Put the cgi in your public_html subdirectory (you can put it in a
subdirectory of public_html).

(3) If you use a subdirectory of your public_html directory DO
NOT call the subdirectory "cgi-bin" because it will conflict with the
server's main cgi-bin. It can be called "public_html/cgi" or anything
else.

(4) Set up the correct permissions for the file (e.g. from UNIX shell
set permissions using the command "chmod 755 whatever.cgi").

(5) Access the file by "http://www.your_domain.com/whatever.cgi"
or "http://www.your_domain.com/path_to_cgi/cgi_file_name.cgi".

I uploaded a new version of my web page, but when I view it I still see the old version.

This is probably because when you view web pages, a copy of all of the text and images on the page is stored on your computer. This is called your 'cache'. They are copied to your computer to speed up your web browsing experience. (The second time you visit a page, it loads much faster because all of the images are loaded directly off of your computer, rather than downloading them again.)

When you are visiting your page, it could be loading the old version that was stored in your cache. You can reload the page and you should see the newer version.

Unix is a very case-sensitive operating system. In unix, image.GIF, Image.gif, and ImAgE.GiF are three totally different files.

Most of the time, if you have an image in your web page, and you reference the image in your code using any capital letters, and the actual image is stored on the server in all lowercase, or different letters are capital etc, than that image will not load.

To fix this problem, be sure that the filename that you are referencing in your code is consistant with the actual filename. A good rule of thumb is to always use all lowercase filenames.

Why are some or all of my links giving me a "File not found" error even though I know I uploaded them?

Unix is a very case-sensitive operating system. In unix, file.htm, FILE.HTM, and FiLe.HtM are three totally different files.

Most of the time, if you have a link in your web page, and you reference the filename in your code using capital letters, and the actual filename is stored on the server in all lowercase, or different letters are capital etc, than that file will not load.

To fix this problem, be sure that the filename that you are referencing in your code is consistant with the actual filename. A good rule of thumb is to always use all lowercase filenames.

How do I increase my chances of being found by Web Search Engines (ie. Lycos, Excite)?

If you insert the following tags into your HTML document, it will increase your chances of coming up as a match when someone on the Internet does a search for specific things.

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="place a description of your web site in here.">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="place all keywords here that pertain to your web site, seperate all words with commas">

To exclude all pages of a site from an index, it is necessary to write a robots.txt file for the site.

To exclude specific sections of your site from being indexed create the following text file:

The items in red should be changed to specific folders / files that you want excluded from search engine spider/bot indexing. The list for 'Disallow' 's can be as long as you want.
(please note: most search engine indexing sites do their indexing every couple of days so your changes may not take effect immediatly.)

While Microsoft's FrontPage 2000 has many new and exciting features, there is one feature of which you need to be keenly aware. When publishing files, whether making simple changes to your site or adding new pages, Comcation strongly encourages its web customers using this tool to always select the "Publish the Entire Site" option. If the "Update Only" option is selected (which is the default), your files on the web server that are not maintained via FrontPage will be deleted.

One particular (and costly) scenario that has affected our customers is the inadvertent deletion of shopping cart software. For example, ShopSite deployments include the directories 'data', 'store', and 'cgi', which are not maintained via the FrontPage product. ShopSite customers using FrontPage to maintain their web site who elect to use the "Update Only" option will delete their on-line store and all its product and order data.

This is not a bug in the Microsoft product; it is a feature that is there to help web site maintainers easily clean-up older files. Please do not complain to Comcation or Microsoft about this issue, just be aware of it and use FrontPage product accordingly.

For more information regarding FrontPage 2000, please visit the Microsoft website. www.microsoft.com