Jargon: Wordpress, SSH, and FTP

The web has often been described as a series of pipes. Data shooting back and forth between machines as soon as you can think about it. While this analogy isn’t technically correct, it serves the purpose. Many of the blogs that you frequent within the community are points of origins within these pipes. A popular technology that serves this information is packaged code called Wordpress. It is written in PHP, provided as open-source, and actually powers this blog. When you type in the address ‘BlackWeb20.com’ in your browser, your computer sends a request along a ‘pipe’ to a service that has a list of a lot addresses. This service connects with other services to find the numerical address of ‘BlackWeb20.com’, communicates back to your computer that address, and you are taken there. When you connect to that address, the Wordpress code is interpreted, processed, and presented to you in the mashable form of this great blog! In short, Wordpress is a platform to present content through the pipes.

What about when you are downloading a file? Even better, what about when you have your website, and you want to put a file on it for people to download? This process is called File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. Instead of your browser requesting the details of a mashed up page to read, you make a request for a file to be downloaded or placed to a particular location. Most, if not all browsers, natively support the downloading of files directly. They are, therefore, considered a FTP tool, or client. There are, however, better FTP clients. For the Mac, I prefer Cyberduck. For the PC, I prefer Filezilla. Extending the idea of downloading and uploading files, these professional clients go far beyond pictures, mp3’s, and videos. When one migrates their website, installs plugins for Wordpress, or sets up a new website environment, these tools become essential. They allow you to transfer files via a protocol in a bulk manner, expeditiously.

The next logical question is can you securely transmit these files? That is where SSH comes into play. Secure Shell (SSH) is a preferred protocol by system administrators (the people who maintain, fix, and upgrade your server) via the command line. It is a secure way of transmitting data using a shared encryption key. With a little practice, SSH can quickly allow a user to upload, unpack (or unzip), edit, create, save, open, and confirm necessary files for your website. Don’t get me wrong. There are secure methods via the FTP clients I mentioned above as well (called SFTP), but learning and utilizing the commands of SSH takes your game to the next level! On the Mac, the Terminal is a native SSH client. On the PC, you can download Putty for free. The most common commands you can start off learning are:

• wget <location>: download a file from a particular <location>
• cd <directory>: change to <directory>
• ls: list the files in the current directory
• nano or vi <file>: open <file> in a text editor
• rm <file>: remove <file>

*You’ll want to replace the words in the brackets <> with the actual names and locations of the entities you are manipulating.

If you have any further questions about anything I’ve discussed, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Bright Plum.