FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is an ancient protocol developed to allow people with accounts on more than one computer to transfer files from one account to another. For example, someone on the faculty at Harvard might do research with someone at Stanford and have an account on a Stanford computer for this purpose.
If your computer experience is only with single-user personal computers, "account on a computer" may be an unfamiliar concept. This was back in the days when all computers were big machines with lots of users - you didn't have a computer on your desk, you had a terminal used to access a big computer in a school or company Computer Center.
The Computer Center didn't want just anybody using it's computer, and you didn't want just anybody messing with your files. So the people authorized to use the computer were given names called userids to identify themselves and passwords to prove their identity. Because there usually was a time charge for using the computer, the combination was called an account, and the name stuck.
FTP is a way of messing with files over a network, so it has a way to log into an account on a remote computer. From your account on one computer you can use an FTP program to "get" or "put" your own remote files. You can even use it to rename or delete your files, or to create directories ("folders" if you must).
However, people did sometimes have files to which they wanted to allow public access, so one day someone had the bright idea of creating a special login account named "anonymous". Anybody could access this account's files without even identifying themselves. This proved a wildly popular idea, and soon a huge amount of information became available by anonymous FTP. In fact, anonymous FTP became so widely used that most people did far more anonymous FTP than non-anonymous FTP.
This was before "point and click" hid from people what was actually going on, so they knew they were really logging in with a special id. However, when you do anonymous FTP regularly, and you do little if any FTP of any other kind, and you're talking to other people who also mostly do only anonymous FTP, you stop bothering to say "anonymous FTP" all the time. Instead, you say just "FTP" for what is common, and you invent the new phrase "real FTP" for accessing your own remote files by logging into a remote account.
When you wrap anonymous FTP in a point and click interface, which is what browsers do, then the process of logging in with login id "anonymous" is hidden behind a veil where newcomers can't see it, so they don't know it's happening. On an Internet that's doubling in size each year, a year after the browsers come out, half the people on the net are new and don't know there's a "real" FTP. A year later it's a quarter of the people, then 1/8th, and pretty soon real FTP is on its way to becoming the stuff of legend and folklore, its very existence relegated to myth.
Well, folks, let's dispel that myth: real FTP really does exist, and it even has more or less point and click interfaces. Most browsers and FTP URLs (like ftp://ftp.netheaven.com/...) only let you do anonymous downloads from public archives, but real FTP will let you do uploads from your computer to a server, if you have an account you can FTP into.
If you're a NetHeaven member, you have such an account, for uploading the files that become your Web pages when accessed via our Web server. You need FTP software to use your account, and in our (anonymous) FTP archive we have some that you can download via (anonymous) FTP. To make that easy, below are links to click on to download FTP software you can then use to do (real) FTP uploads.
Once more just to be sure it is clear. When you click on one of the links below, your browser will use anonymous FTP to download the software. Once you have it, you can use it to do real FTP to upload your Web page data into your NetHeaven account.
While FTP programs (applications) like these can do real FTP, they were primarily written as ways to do anonymous FTP, for people who do a lot of anonymous FTP or like to have more control over what is happening than a browser gives them.
To upload your web pages with WinFTP, you need to tell it to do a real FTP to the host www.netheaven.com. You specify that you want a real FTP by giving it your own login id and password to use instead of "anonymous". Fetch and any other program are much the same; they differ in details, but if you understand this page and experiment a little, you shoudn't have much trouble.
If your password for connecting to our network and your password for mail are different, your mail password is the one you use for FTP.
Once you establish the FTP connection, winftp will display two file browsers similar in concept to the file manager. The one on the left browses the files and directories on your own PC, while the one on the right browses your files and directories on the NetHeaven web server system. To upload a file, your browse on the right to the place you want to put it, and on the left you select the file you want to put there. Then click on the left-to-right arrow to upload the file.