LP:
Here’s a very basic description of what a Web server does, because this might help clarify what’s going on with a Web server, and what you need to do to get a file to work correctly on one.
These are very general notes. You will have to apply intelligence to use them in your specific circumstance.
All web servers behave in an almost identical fashion. When a URL is entered in a browser (such as www.tumult.com), the browser initiates a connection to the server and looks for a file there called ‘index.htm’.
Forward-slashes following the main URL (www.tumult.com/hype/) indicate directories or folders on the server hosting the website. So if you were able to browse the Tumult server, you would see a folder there called ‘hype’, within which would be another ‘index.htm’ file. (Among other things, such as images, which load in the ‘index.htm’ file when the browser displays it.)
When you’re attempting to upload a file to a Web server and you want it to load automatically in a browser when the site is accessed, the file needs to be called ‘index.htm’.
To prepare your Hype project for upload, you’d have something like this on your hard drive (exported directly from Hype to your hard disk):
[Folder] my_project
[File inside folder] index.htm
[Folder inside folder] index.hyperesources
That’s not how it will look when Hype first exports it. What you’ll see instead is something more like this:
[Folder] my_project
[File inside folder] my_project.htm
[Folder inside folder] my_project.hyperesources
As you might guess, you’ll have to rename at least one item: The my_project.htm file. Rename it to index.htm.
If your domain is called ‘mydomain.net’, and you upload the folder called ‘my_folder’ to it, the way people would access it in a browser would be to enter mydomain.net/my_folder/. The browser would then automatically locate the ‘index.htm’ file (your Hype project) and display it.
Programs such as Cyberduck allow you to browse Web servers (that you have authorized access to!) in a way similar to how you look at files and folders on your computer. Usually, but NOT always, the Web content is contained on the Web server in a folder named ‘public’.
So to upload your ‘my_folder’ folder through Cyberduck, you would:
- Connect to the Web server through Cyberduck.
- Open the ‘public’ folder on the Web server.
- Upload ‘my_folder’ into the ‘public’ folder.
From that moment on, the ‘index.htm’ file contained in ‘my_folder’ will be accessible to anyone who goes to mydomain.net/my_folder/.
Google Drive does not render HTML either, so it’s no more an option than Dropbox is.
I cannot underscore enough the necessity of your learning the barest minimums about how the internet actually works, if you intend to do any productive work on the internet at all. Take some time to read books or take courses on HTTP and how it works. Do the same for FTP. Learn the basics of HTML, at least to the extent that you know what tags are, what a hyperlink looks like, and how external files are referenced.
You don’t necessarily need to know how every single aspect of each internet protocol does what it’s doing, but you should be able to at least understand the difference between HTTP and FTP, and the different things you can and can’t do with them. Get to know the protocols and what they’re doing on the back end, so you don’t find yourself in the situation of needing to do something that really isn’t particularly difficult, but not having enough familiarity to get started with it.