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Latest news

17 Mar 2008: Filezilla version 3.0.8.1 has been released.

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• Filezilla

Maintaining Your Website

It is very important to have a reliable File Transfer mechanism so that you can quickly update your site as you make corrections or improvements.

It is also important to ensure that your site is up to date with regards to references and links to other sites. It is a fairly common experience on even very popular websites to find that a link does not open or an image is missing. This will of course deter people from coming back to your site. So my basic conclusion is that a website is always undergoing change and therefore if you arrange for someone to develop a website for you, then you should have a capability of maintaining it yourself, otherwise you could be paying out a lot for maintenance. Or worse still the developer is no longer available and you now have a website that is out of date.

Basic Requirements

• Easily configurable so that logons can be automated using passwords (only allow memorising of passwords if you are the sole user of the machine)
• The ability to connect to several sites. For example I have used e-securenetworks and ntl for hosting my website, and I also uploaded some photos to the photobox website
• The ability to drag and drop files from your hard drive location to the target directory
• An intuitive user interface
• Options such as viewing hidden files and setting Unix permissions
• The software should be freeware

The Choice

There is no shortage of choices for file transfer software. I first tried a trial version of Terrapin that was recommended by the NTL website. However, this costs £29 for a licence, so I started searching on the net and eventually, came to the Sourceforge website, which incidentally carries a whole host of open source software, and this was where I found Filezilla. Once you have downloaded the software there is a straightforward installation program to run. It is worth checking regularly at Sourceforge to ensure you are using the latest version. I have been using Filezilla (current version 2.26a) for well over a year and during that time I have not had any problems with either installing or using the software.

Setting Up Filezilla

This again is straightforward and I had no problems establishing connections to three different web servers. From the site manager menu option, click on 'New Site' and complete the requested information as follows :-

• New Site Name - Rename to something meaningful to you e.g. Photo Site
• Host - the name given to you by your service provider for uploads e.g. upload.ntlworld.com will connect to the NTL FTP site.
• Port - this will normally be '21' for FTP file transfers
• logontype - usually set this to 'normal'
• user - the user name assigned to you by your service provider
• password - the password assigned to you by your service provider

You should then be ready to connect. Filezilla automatically detects whether you are sending ascii or binary. There are many other settings, but these are only required for more advanced usage.

Using Filezilla

In common with most users I tend to have a directory structure on my hard drive that matches the target directory. It is important to follow these rules otherwise you will find that your website is out of step with your development. In addition it is worthwhile to have a production copy website and a development website so that you can make changes and test before applying to the production copy. Also if you upload updated files to your website, you may be surprised at first to see that when you view the website the old website pages are still shown. There is nothing wrong with Filezilla, it just means you have to refresh the cache; do this in Firefox by going to the view and select reload and you will find the latest data is there. I remember trying the refresh function in Internet Explorer 6 and this did not always work; so another little reason to change to Firefox.

FileZilla Version 3

I have been using the new version 3 ever since the release candidate was available back in September 2007. From my experience it seems to be a very well behaved application and I have no regrets about leaving the old version 2. Apart from being a total rewrite the only other main advantage seems that it is now available for Linux as well as Windows.