Whatever happened to …

FTP?

This is something that I haven’t thought about for a long time. It came to the forefront of my brain this week when I read a couple of stories like this:

Mozilla set to remove FTP support from Firefox

It was a long time ago when this was a daily routine for me. I was daily updating a personal work website. People would count on it regularly. In the beginning, the website was actually created with a text editor. I’d work on whatever I was doing, test it locally in a browser to make sure that it looked OK and then upload it to the server. I used an FTP (File Transfer Protocol client to do the deed.) Depending upon the computer I was using, I’d either use WS_FTP, Fetch, FileZilla, or just directly in the browser I was using at the time. If I recall correctly, it would have been Netscape.

WS_FTP, in fact, was so powerful, I used it as a file explorer on my Windows computer since it had more power and functionality for me than the Windows Explorer utility.

Later, when the Ministry of Education licensed Dreamweaver for the province,the FTP functionality was built right in. It was important that each of our schools had a regularly updated web presence and so I had our webserver supervisor create a login/password for every one of our school and then a barrage of workshops followed. In particular, our CIESC (Computers in Education School Contacts) made amazing websites that were unique to each school. No templates here.

How about you for a Sunday web publishing insight…

• Do the applications, WS_FTP, Fetch, or FileZilla ring a bell with you? How?
• Did you use another application?
• Do you have an FTP client currently installed on your computer?
• Bonus geek points if you can remember the default port for FTP. (No Googling…)
• These days, it’s seldom that you see school websites that are unique. Typically, they’ve been replaced by a template so that all schools look the same.
• Many people use a hosted system for a web presence. What’s your choice and why? (WordPress, Blogger, Google Sites, …)

Please share your thoughts in the comments below. We’d love to know your thoughts.

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