(no subject)

[asterroc]

Suppose I wanted to get a webpage. Suppose I know the URL I want and no one else has it. Suppose I also need server space to host the actual webpage. Now what?

Edit: Suppose it is for a professional website.

Originally posted on Dreamwidth. comments there. Comment here or there.

Comments

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Professional - I'm applying to grad schools and I'd like to have a website not hosted at my work.

[rosefox]

Do you mostly need to host website text (e.g. a resume, a personal statement) or downloadable files (e.g. papers you've written, videos)?

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Text and small downloadable files (.pdf, .ppt, .docx) mostly. I'm basically going to mirror (and improve) my current page, the third hit on Google for my name.

[rosefox]

Wordpress.com might be your best bet, then. It's very easy to build a Wordpress website and I believe they offer file hosting. If not, you can get a Dropbox account for free and host small files in a public folder there.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. Let's say I get the domain zandperl.com , how can Wordpress or Dropbox let me actually put an html file at that URL? Can I host a whole website within Dropbox?

[rosefox]

Wordpress will let you point www.zandperl.com to (say) zandperl.wordpress.com, pretty much invisibly.

You can have different pages hosted at zandperl.wordpress.com that you build like blog pages, but they will look like regular web pages: there are no comments, you can use a pre-made design that has a website look rather than a blog look, etc. Here's a tutorial with examples. (Ignore the bit about installing Wordpress on your host site; you won't need to do that.)

The site is all maintained Wordpress-style, so editing pages will be a lot like editing blog entries--similar to editing LJ entries, in fact.

Dropbox will let you create a folder full of public files. It looks just like a folder on your desktop, but they're stored on Dropbox's servers, and you can add links to those files from your website.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Oh I see how to get my Dropbox to give a link in the public files, the sample file in there has the following URL:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1284589/Top%20Secret.txt

If I use that though, is there a way that I can get it so that someone on my theoretical zandperl.com site won't see the link as a dropbox.com address but as a zandperl.com address instead?

I'd rather be editing separate .html files on my computer and uploading them, than dealing with templates on a blog site. What I really want is to just be ssh-ing into something that appears on my screen as zandperl.com .

[rosefox]

You are a very perplexing combination of power user and neophyte!

Dreamhost offers SSH access and I know lots of people who recommend them.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I have never hosted my own website, so I'm asking all sorts of newbie questions along those lines. I have always had space on a college/university server that I could access through text-based ssh, and once on a friend's server. Sometimes I chose to use a program that give me a drag-n-drop interface, but it was conceptually the same thing. My current school is the only one where I haven't been able to ssh in, and was forced to use a Microsoft product to interface with the server.

I do not want to use a blog template because I want to understand every line of .html code, even if I couldn't generate it independently. I am starting to learn .css, but I'm still really new at it so I can't understand most templates, and I like a very clean look anyway (where my sense of "clean" includes not wanting images as borders).

[rosefox]

I do not want to use a blog template because I want to understand every line of .html code

That's the thing that makes you a power user! Most people really couldn't care less.