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Website Administration Help

James Brown

James Brown

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Calling all web gurus. I need help...

For a long time, I've owned the domain jamesabrown.com which I maintain at cheap-domainregistration.com

For the first time, I've created a webpage to display, and it's hosted at freehosting.host.

When I first signed up, they gave me a temporary web address, and it works perfectly. It currently has my content which I created for an online class I'm taking.

If I read the directions right, I need to inform cheap-domainregistration.com of freehosting.host's name servers (ns1.freehosting.host and ns2.freehosting.host) so that anyone clicking on jamesabrown.com will see the content I have at the temporary web address. I'm pretty sure I've done that, and they said changes should take 24-48 hours to propogate. That was three days ago.

At first, anyone browsing to jamesabrown.com was met with a dead link, but now it has a generic "Sorry, contact your webmaster" page. So it's pretty clear I haven't done something right, but I'm not sure what.

Thanks in advance.
 
James Brown said:
If I read the directions right, I need to inform cheap-domainregistration.com of freehosting.host's name servers (ns1.freehosting.host and ns2.freehosting.host) so that anyone clicking on jamesabrown.com will see the content I have at the temporary web address. I'm pretty sure I've done that, and they said changes should take 24-48 hours to propogate. That was three days ago.

At first, anyone browsing to jamesabrown.com was met with a dead link, but now it has a generic "Sorry, contact your webmaster" page. So it's pretty clear I haven't done something right, but I'm not sure what.
Click to expand...

I can help eliminate some causes but can't provide a solution.

1. You've added the nameservers correctly. See here: https://intodns.com/jamesabrown.com

2. The nameserver change has propagated. See #1.

Unless one of the more experienced webmasters has a solution, I suggest you open a support ticket with FreeHosting.

You may need to manually add the domain to the service:

1. Log into your members dashboard at FreeHosting.
2. Click on your service.
3. Click Manage Domains in the sidebar.
4. Make sure jamesabrown.com is listed at the bottom of that screen.
5. Add it if it isn't there.
 
The NS records only state that freehosting.host is authoritative for the jamesabrown.com domain. Your A record actually points to the specific physical location that's served by a browser that hits the jamesabrown.com page.

You'll want to figure out what the correct A record should be, as the current one doesn't seem to be correct.

Code: 
C:\Users\Deepak>dig jamesabrown.com ANY

; <<>> DiG 9.11.0 <<>> jamesabrown.com ANY
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 62373
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;jamesabrown.com.               IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      A       45.35.114.212
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      SOA     simplehost.com.br. dns.simplehost.com.br. 2016101502 10800 3600 604800 3600
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      NS      ns2.freehosting.host.
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      NS      ns1.freehosting.host.

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      NS      ns2.freehosting.host.
jamesabrown.com.        120     IN      NS      ns1.freehosting.host.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns2.freehosting.host.   120     IN      A       45.35.114.148

;; Query time: 192 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.1.1#53(192.168.1.1)
;; WHEN: Wed Oct 19 07:22:25 Eastern Daylight Time 2016
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 213

You should also CNAME www to @ so that anyone hitting www.jamesabrown.com gets redirected to the root (A) record.
 
Well, I finally got my website working, after three tickets with the webhosts. But now I'm stuck again.

Looking at the folder structure at my control panel, I have a folder labeled 'jamesabrown.com' which contains my index.html, my other html pages, a folder called Images which contains exactly that. When displaying an image, my html reads src=".\Images\picture1.jpg" etc. That all works as expected.

Poking around the hosting site, I saw the option to create a sub-domain, and they even suggested "blog.example.com" which is exactly what I would like to do.

So I created the subdomain 'blog.jamesabrown.com' which created a new folder in my control panel, and in that folder I put a small index.html file and another folder called "Images" with a single jpg in it. Trouble is, the image isn't appearing online. I'm not sure if my HTML is pointing to the wrong location, or I made a mistake on where I've saved my image file, or what. Just for grins, I put a copy of the image into the Image folder under the folder 'jamesabrown.com' and that didn't change anything either.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
 
James Brown said:
Well, I finally got my website working, after three tickets with the webhosts. But now I'm stuck again.

Looking at the folder structure at my control panel, I have a folder labeled 'jamesabrown.com' which contains my index.html, my other html pages, a folder called Images which contains exactly that. When displaying an image, my html reads src=".\Images\picture1.jpg" etc. That all works as expected.

Poking around the hosting site, I saw the option to create a sub-domain, and they even suggested "blog.example.com" which is exactly what I would like to do.

So I created the subdomain 'blog.jamesabrown.com' which created a new folder in my control panel, and in that folder I put a small index.html file and another folder called "Images" with a single jpg in it. Trouble is, the image isn't appearing online. I'm not sure if my HTML is pointing to the wrong location, or I made a mistake on where I've saved my image file, or what. Just for grins, I put a copy of the image into the Image folder under the folder 'jamesabrown.com' and that didn't change anything either.

Does anyone have any suggestions?
Click to expand...

The source code for blog.jamesabrown.com:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"[]>
<html>
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
  <head>
    <link href="style.css" media="screen" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <script type="text/javascript" src="script.js"></script><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
    <title>James A. Brown - Blog</title>
  </head>
  <body alink="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffff" link="#000000" text="#000000" vlink="#000000">
    <p><img src="P5290248.JPG" border="1"></p>
    <p><a href="http://jamesabrown.com">JamesABrown.com</a> | And so on... (blog) | Resume</p>
  </body>
</html>

The bolded code tells the browser to look for an image resource called http://blog.jamesabrown.com/P5290248.JPG, which means it's looking for the image in your blog's root folder, not an images/ subfolder. If you have put the image file in a subfolder called images (eg. blog/images) then you need to include the proper relative path in the markup:

<img src="images/P5290248.JPG" border="1">

This tells the browser to look for an image resource called http://blog.jamesabrown.com/images/P5290248.JPG

However, this path will only work for the URL blog.jamesabrown.com

if you have a page called blog.jamesabrown.com/article/intro-to-multimedia then the above code will tell the browser to request an image resource called http://blog.jamesabrown.com/article/intro-to-multimedia/images/P5290248.JPG, because the browser uses the current URL as a base-directory.

You have to explicitly tell the browser to always start in the site's root folder by adding a slash at the start of the path, eg:

<img src="/images/P5290248.JPG" border="1">

This will always resolve to http://blog.jamesabrown.com/images/P5290248.JPG for any page on that subdomain, and will resolve to http://jamesabrown.com/images/P5290248.JPG for any page on your root domain

Some other pointers:
  • You should avoid using backslashes; the forward slash is the correct path delimiter for URLs.
  • You should also stick to lowercase for folder and file names: URLs are not case sensitive but you may use web servers and software that are.
  • Put your meta tags inside the <head> element as recommended by W3C.
  • Your markup is not XHTML 1.0, it's HTML5, so you can simplify your doctype to just <!DOCTYPE html>
 
Wow, thanks, bigfield.

I can't access my control panel from work, so I'll give your recommendations a shot tonight.

Thanks again!
 
Whew! Finally got it, thanks to you, bigfield.

You were right about the case-sensitive part. That was the biggest thing tripping me up, and as a Windows SA that's not something I have to think about very often.

Now I just need to think about what else I'm going to do with this website. I read quite a few blogs, and they seem so polished and easy to administer. When an author takes a picture of the plane at the airport, and posts it on his blog along with a hundred words of text before he even boards the plane, I'm amazed he makes it look so easy. Me, I'm cracking open the laptop and launching text editors and image editors and a browser or three, and before long it's time to go to bed.

Oh well, that's part of the learning process, I suppose.
 
James Brown said:
Whew! Finally got it, thanks to you, bigfield.

You were right about the case-sensitive part. That was the biggest thing tripping me up, and as a Windows SA that's not something I have to think about very often.

Now I just need to think about what else I'm going to do with this website. I read quite a few blogs, and they seem so polished and easy to administer. When an author takes a picture of the plane at the airport, and posts it on his blog along with a hundred words of text before he even boards the plane, I'm amazed he makes it look so easy. Me, I'm cracking open the laptop and launching text editors and image editors and a browser or three, and before long it's time to go to bed.

Oh well, that's part of the learning process, I suppose.
Click to expand...
You'll need to use a Content Management System (CMS).

I specialise in Drupal, but Wordpress is more beginner-friendly. You can probably install it to your blog subdomain through your admin panel.
 
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