Going Online

Faircamp provides you with a complete website - technically this takes the form of a directory on your computer, by default the .faircamp_build directory (hidden, as it starts on a dot) that gets created right inside your catalog directory. In order to actually get your site online, these things are needed:

• A domainname such as example.com

  These can be bought from a number of providers online, and are paid yearly. Price varies a lot depending on the TLD (the .com/.net/.something part), and a litte depending on the provider. The cheapest domains start out at about 10-20$ a year (usually long-existing, popular TLDs like .com). Ask online or among friends for provider recommendations, compare prices, also pay attention that some providers will offer very cheap rates for the first year only, but then let you pay the actual price from the second year on.

• A place to host your files (webhosting)

  This too can be bought from a number of providers online. It's recommended to get a webhosting subscription (which might also be called "webspace" or differently with some providers) from the same provider that you get your domain from, this simplifies the process. Make sure that your webhosting package includes enough space (a faircamp site will conventionally have between a few hundred MB to a few GB, this depends a lot on your content). Here as well it pays to ask around a bit and compare options. Webhosting will cost you a few $ per month, starting at around 2$, again depends on the specifics and provider. You can also host a faircamp site from a computer on your own premises, but this is a bit of a different story and for now not covered here.

• A means to upload your files (e.g. FTP or SSH)

  Conventionally, your webhosting provider allows you to set up an FTP account, that is, practically, an address, username and password that you enter in an FTP client in order to get access to the file system of your webhost and be able to transfer files from your computer up to their server. A very capable, free and open source FTP client that is available on all platforms is FileZilla, but there are plenty others you can use. Using such a client you upload the generated faircamp site (the contents of the .faircamp_build directory) into the right directory on your server (your provider should provide documentation where to place it), and then you might still need to "connect" your domain name to this folder using your webprovider's user interface - this too should be documented by your provider. Here as well don't shy away from asking online, asking friends, or asking a search engine for guides on this, they are out there.

  A more advanced way to upload the site, if supported by the provider, which brings additional convenience once you get it to work, is to use a tool like rsync to automatically synchronize the contents between your locally generated faircamp site and the online hosted version. This requires a webprovider that offers ssh access - most, but not all, do.

Known Gotchas

Encoding of special characters in filenames

In very rare circumstances it can happen that the way some special characters are encoded in filenames in your faircamp site is subtly changed during upload to the server, leading to that file not being accesible from the faircamp site, although present. Concretely speaking, this has been observed by someone who used Cyberduck to upload their site. One song containing "å" was not accessible because it was encoded as just "å" on their computer, but converted to "a" + "°" during upload (a perfectly valid and visually indistinguishable way to encode the character using unicode). If you're observing something similar, try using another FTP client (or rsync), and/or it should theoretically also be possible to configure Cyberduck to not do this conversion on upload.