OT - Quick Website Question
 

Ok, about 15 years ago I was a Unix admistrator, so I know a little about how this stuff works, but I'm at a loss here. I bought some webspace (scarboroughlimited.com) and I tried to upload a BMP (rivers.bmp) using the file manager - ok done and done.

Now, however, I can't see it on the web. I set the file permissions correctly, but for some reason it gives me the 404 File Not Found error. :(

The file is sitting there, right in the parent directory. What up?

A couple of things come to mind, just from similar problems I've had
1) Check to see if uppercase/lowercase is consistent between how the file is named in the directory & the URL you're trying to access
2) When checking that, look at the .bmp file extension -- in one instance, the default in the host directory was .BMP while I was typing .bmp and although I didn't believe that should matter ... it did.

Here's what I'm typing in Explorer: http://www.scarboroughlimited.com/rivers.bmp

Here's what my website file manager says: rivers.bmp and it's located in the root directory.

Am I doing something wrong?

I'm far from an expert, but what you are doing is basically what I do when posting stuff to my wife's website and we've had no problems. So I'd say you are doing it right so it must be something else (perhaps something to do with the website host?).

Edit: Also check the "duh!" factor stuff...I once loaded an image for my wife that was blahblah.jpg and was trying to access it by going to blahblah.gif...took me an hour to figure out what I was doing wrong. :D

FWIW, I just tried that link & got the same 404 you're getting.

Something is very likely amiss somewhere in the naming of the file, triple-check it very carefully (I'm not trying to be an ass about this or anything, I just know that I've had more problems with naming issues than every other type of mistake combined). If you're accessing via FTP or whatever, try renaming the .bmp file again, carefully typing "rivers.bmp" as the new name. Sometimes you'll have an obscure space or whatever that's hard to see, such as before the first character.

The other thing that comes to mind, again based solely on my own errors is to make sure that the file is actually stored in the root and not in something that "looked" like the root but was actually an accidentally created sub-directory.
(Yeah, I've managed that stupid screw-up a couple of times).

Just to back Jon up, these are the two most frequent reasons that I have that sort of problem with either of the two sites that I maintain.

AH HAH!

For some reason, I need to put the files into a directory called "public" in order to address them directly from the web.

www.scarboroughlimited.com/river.bmp (yes, I changed the name).

When I moved the file from the root directory to the public directory it worked. Thanks for the help, guys!

Thanks for the backup there SD, I often feel like I've got to be the only person on earth that could possibly manage to screw up those things.

And then I look at ESPN.com and feel much better about my own web skills :D

I'm not sure if this has been answered already since I skimmed through the prior posts, but I am building a website on geocities, and I know that this service doesn't allow BMP files. So what I did was open up your basic Microsoft Office Paint, or some other Paint Shop program, opened the BMP file, and then saved as a jpeg. And then I uploaded and everything seems fine.

http://www.geocities.com/gottimd

You can also get a lot of HTML help from this page as well....

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/geo/ghtml/

Craig, usually the "home" directory of your web server is not the root directory of your machine.

And a friendly notice : BMPs suck and take un-necessary bandwidth, convert them to jpg or png file

Yo diggity, glad you got it fixed. Those things can be an absolute PITA in the worst way.

(Can you tell how much I'm looking forward to creating another d'load page for my work site next week? Nothing but link after link to various files for vendors to grab. Troubleshooting that thing is usually a real bitch).

Yeah, I know...it's only a 25k file and was just a "quick" test. Unfortunately, it wasn't as quick as intended :D .

I would post more girlie pix if you want more traffic.