HOW CUTE! (CuteFTP)

Name: brianlfc

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Product:	CuteFTP
Date:	10/10/01 (121 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very Easy to use, Very Reliable, Some great extras

Disadvantages: The Price

Right, you’ve made a web page and you now want to get it online, in other words, upload it onto your web space server or you may just want to go to a FTP site and download some useful utilities or games.

Well, what do you do?
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You get yourself a FTP program and that does the job for you, I normally use Cute FTP, as I find it very simple to use and is an ideal beginner’s program but can also do the job for seasoned Internet users.

What’s an FTP Program?
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Firstly let me tell you that FTP stands for “File Transfer Protocol” in other words, it just means the transfer system that can be used to upload/download files off the Internet, it is a very easy procedure once you have the correct program, and that’s where Cute FTP comes in.

Cute FTP is a shareware program (as most of these type of utilities generally are) and can be found on numerous download sites, i.e. download.com, tucows.com, etc, for a free 30 day trial, to use the program after this 30 day trial is over, it will put you back around $30 to $40 (around £20 to £25 in GB pounds).

I myself have tried several such programs, including the likes of Flash FXP, etc, but I honestly find Cute FTP the better program despite it not having the same amount of features. The general layout of the program is much neater and easier to get your head around.

So how do I use the program?
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Well, let’s say you have written a web page and you want to upload it, I know a lot of “online web hosts” generally have onsite uploading capabilities, but these are generally slow and clumsy to use. So your best bet is to upload them using your own FTP software, here I’ll explain the simple instructions needed to carry out this procedure using Cute FTP.

Connecting to your web spaces FTP site:
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Now with Cute FTP this is pretty simple, because once you load the program, a little “Site manager” appears, there are two ways to go about filling in this “Site manager” (which is just basically all the information and password stuff to access your web space). You can either use the “Wizard”; this will give you an explanation of the various things you need to input. Or you can just do it manually, for this I will give you an example, as being new to FTP software can be a bit challenging:

Label:
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All this is, is the name of the connection you are making, you can call it anything you want, it is just so you can choose the same connection another time, it will not effect any settings or anything.

FTP Host Address:
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This is your sites server address, which basically means your web address, i.e. www.yourwebaddress.yourisp.co.uk, this will be where your web page is hosted, thus meaning anything uploaded needs to go here.

FTP Site Username:
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This is the username you use, this can be either your username for the web host or the actual name of your site, i.e. the “yourwebaddress” part of your url, this will depend on where your site is hosted.

FTP Password:
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This is basically your password you require to enter your web space server, you would have given your web host this password, so please remember it.

FTP site connection port:
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This will nearly always be port 21, this basically means the port to which yours and the host computer will connect to transfer any data.

Login type:
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Usually the required option here is just “Normal” login, you’ll find the anonymous option is usually used for logging on to other FTP download sites.

You have now filled in all the vital details, the thing to
do now is press the “connect” button, if all is well and you have filled in the correct information, you will now be connected to your Host’s server and will be ready to upload any data you want.

Whilst connected, you will see a Explorer type of page with two windows open, the one on the left is your computer and any folders you may want to upload from or download into, the window on the right is the FTP sites window, and will include any existing stuff you have uploaded or anything you may want to download, it is now just a case of selecting the file you want to transfer and uploading/downloading it, to do this, either double-click on the file or use the right mouse button. So remember Upload actually means anything you are sending to the Internet and Download is something that you are receiving off the Internet.

Cute FTP also includes several other nifty little utilities, these include a File or MP3 search utility, which actually acts as a mini Napster type of thing, but is pretty limited as it only uses a handful of Search Engines (rather than actually being a download server like Napster). There is also a very basic html editor included called CUTE Html editor, amongst other things.

The main advantage I find with Cute FTP is its reliability, whilst at times I cannot connect to various servers or FTP sites with other FTP programs, I find Cute FTP does the job 99% of the time, which is very useful if you are forever uploading/downloading stuff.

So there you have it, a basic description of what I think is an excellent little piece of FTP software, it’s not too complicated so the total beginners are able to use it easily and at the same time, it has enough options for the seasoned pro to use, I thoroughly recommend Cute FTP to anyone that requires such software.

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