Family History Hosting Menu

Overview

The Family History Hosting menu includes the Publish command which automates the process of publishing a site on the Family History Hosting service.

You must be an existing customer of Family History Hosting to use the Publish command.

Publish

The Publish command automates the process of uploading your site. It uses property values from the Publish Section to connect to the FTP server for your site and uploads the files for you.

After you build your site, and after you enter the required values in the Publish Section, select the Family History Hosting > Publish command. Second Site will take care of the rest; it will compress files, connect to the server, check for the existence of the proper folders, and upload the files.

The Publish command uses two techniques to reduce the amount of data that must be uploaded to the server:

1. For the HTML and associated files that make up the bulk of the files in a site, it compresses the files into one or more ZIP archives and then uploads the archive(s). The compression process saves space, and transferring a few ZIP files incurs less FTP overhead than transferring many small files.
2. For files stored in subfolders of the Output (-o) folder, such as the image files stored in the exhibit folder, Second Site keeps track of the last version of the file that it uploaded, and it will only upload the file again when it has changed.

Firewall

The Publish command connects to the Internet using both the HTTP and FTP protocols. If you are using firewall software, you will have to allow the Second Site application to connect to the Internet.

Synchronization of Folder Contents

The Publish command keeps the web server folders "in synch" with the local versions of those folders on your PC: it will remove files from the web server folder(s) if they do not exist in the PC folder(s). For that reason, you should not manually upload files to the web server. If your site includes files that Second Site does not know about because you entered the HTML to reference those files yourself, you should place those folders in the Input (-i) folder, or a subfolder of the Input (-i) folder, prior to uploading the site via the Publish command.

Log File

During the upload process, Second Site writes a log to a file named ss-ftp.log in the same folder as the current SDF file. If you report a problem using the Publish command, the Family History Hosting support staff may request that you send them the log file to help with problem determination.