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Trivia About Today:

August 20th 2008

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Wednesday is considered either the third or the fourth day of the week, between Tuesday and Thursday. The name comes from the Middle English Wednes dei, which is from Old English Wodnes dæg, meaning the day of the Germanic god Woden (Wodan) who was a god of the Anglo-Saxons in England until about the 7th century. Wodnes dæg is like the Old Norse Oðinsdagr ("Odin's day"), which is an early translation of the Latin dies Mercurii ("Mercury's day"). Although Mercury (the messenger of the gods) and Woden (the king of the Germanic gods) are not equivalent in most regards, both gods guided the souls of the dead to the underworld.

Signing Up

Now that you have signed up as a registered GaltGroup member, you will be able to easily create a new account. Let's begin.

If you are not logged in, you will need to do that in order to continue. When you are logged in, you will notice two new items have appeared in the menu on the left side of the page under the title "User Menu: username. In this case I am using bahblabla from our previous chapter where we signed up for our GaltGroup memberships.

The two new items are "Member Profile" and "Account Settings." Your member profile is used to change your personal information, such as contact email, mailing address, and password. For now we will stay focused on creating our web account. Following that logic, let's click "Account Settings."

Okay so here we are at the account settings page, not much to see here. It seems to think we haven't purchased a web account. That explains the lack of information about our accounts then. Let's rectify that by clicking the "Create a GaltGroup Web Account" link.

This page explains that a basic account, which is checked for us automatically, comes with 100MB of web space. This is the total amount of space of site can occupy without adding more space later. How much space is 100MB? One letter takes up the space of 1 byte on a computer, therefore is roughly the equivalent of 100 million letters worth of space. Assuming 5 characters plus a space per word, that's enough space to hold 16 million words. Images and sounds take up a lot more space than text does, but 100MB should be plenty of space for your web site. Remember, if you do fill up that space, you can add more space later.

Also, FTP access is included. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol" and it is the primary method used to upload the files that make up your web site on to the server. Web-based uploads are in development and unavailable at this time. Until web uploads become available FTP is the only method open to us. Thankfully, ftping isn't hard, and there are many good graphical tools that can get the job done. How to FTP is beyond the scope of this article and will be covered in another lesson.

An email account is also included, this is your username@galtgroup.net email we touched upon earlier. As with FTP you will need a client to access you email, and as with FTP there are many good clients available. Accessing your email through your web browser in the same manner as you do for Yahoo! Mail and Gmail is also in development, but for now, the only method is to use a true email client. How to access your GaltGroup email using an email client is also beyond the scope of this document, and will be covered in another lesson.

There are now three options to choose from, monthly and yearly subscriptions, and a free account. A monthly subscription is billed monthly and costs $5.00 CND per month plus additional features should you add them. A yearly pre-paid subscription enjoys a 10% discount, and so costs $54.00 CND per year. Additional features, should you add them, also receive a 10% discount and are billed on a monthly basis according to usage.

The free account is a limited-time offer and may no longer be available when you read this article. GaltGroup is a brand new (as of May 2007) hosting service, and some features are still in a state of development or haven't been tested extensively yet. The core services and features have been extensively tested and are considered very stable. However, GaltGroup would like to recruit a small group of people who can use these free accounts for testing purposes and to collect information from these users about where development and documentation is needed most. If you feel you have the time to use the system and report where you are having problems, or where documentation about how to use the system is lacking, please select the one-year free account offer.

Once you have selected one of the three possible billing choices, go ahead and click "Submit Options."

Next up is Verification and Payment Processing. We are presented with a summary of the features included with your basic account, 100MB of space, FTP access, and an Email Address. Following that is a notice about additional features, how they are billed and a list of the additional features offered. Complete descriptions of these features shall be detailed in a separate lesson, but we can go over them quickly here.

PHP Scripting. PHP is primarily used to add dynamic content to your web site and to interface with a database. Dynamic content means content that changes depending on input from your visitors, or other factors. Interfacing with a database is another way to generate dynamic content, the difference is that the data is generated by input from your database, rather than or in conjunction with input from your visitors. PHP can also be used to create applications that can be served on you web page. Even on line games if you are a skilled PHP coder.

MySQL Database. While PHP can be considered the meat-and-potatoes of many web sites, MySQL is the bread-and-butter. Working together these two features can produce astonishing results at times. MySQL specifically, is a database. Databases excel at storing and retrieving long term data such as information about contacts, products, orders, or saving the position of the playing pieces in that on line game I mentioned a paragraph back. Any time you want to store information about things, a database is a good candidate for the job.

CGI Scripting. CGI has largely been replaced by PHP these days, but if you are a die-hard Perl guy or gal, or you are migrating an existing site that uses CGI over to GaltGroup you will want this feature. Although not entirely accurate, you can think of CGI as another way to do many of the same things PHP can do. The other advantage of CGI is that it is largely language independent, so if you are a programmer in another language and would rather use it than PHP, CGI is the way to go. Although nothing is preventing your from using both.

Server Side Includes. Many of the uses for SSI have been duplicated by PHP. Also, SSI doesn't play well with PHP. So if you have PHP, you probably want to avoid using SSI on your web-site. SSI is provided mainly for the case of an existing web site that uses SSI migrating to GaltGroup, or for the SSI guru.

Secure Socket Layer This is the method web sites use to send scrambled information over the Internet. The information is scrambled (encrypted) in such a way that it will be extremely difficult if not impossible for a third party to decrypt if they do happen to intercept the information as it travels through the Internet. If you are planing to collect potentially sensitive information such as personal information from your visitors or selling a product on-line your should definitely enable this option. GaltGroup uses secure sockets for all of it's network services and doesn't allow plain or clear text sessions. This admittedly makes things a little more complicated for new users, but we take your on line privacy and protection seriously.

In case you were wondering, in another article I'll be walking you through how to set up all of your clients to use secure protocols, so no worries, okay?

Additional Web Space. Additional web space comes in blocks of 100MB. A basic GaltGroup account comes with 100MB of space to start with and you can reserve additional blocks at any time if you start to run out of space. If this is your first web site, 100MB should last you for some time, but when the time comes it's a simple matter to add more.

Now that we've had a chance to gloss over the additional features you should be ready to click "Create My Account" or "Buy Now" depending on what option you selected on the previous screen. What happens next depends on that choice. If you selected a monthly account or a free account you will see a "Processing Request..." screen and after a moment or two another screen that indicates that the transaction was a success, and your account was created.

If you chose the yearly pre-paid account, you will be taken to our Pay Pal portal. If you were redirected to Pay Pal, you will need to elect to input your credit-card information as well as some basic particulars to pay by credit-card. If you don't have or don't wish to use your credit-card, you can log into your Pay Pal account to complete the transaction. If the Pay Pal transaction was successful you will be returned to GaltGroup from Pay Pal. Once your have been returned You will see the same "Processing Request..." screen mentioned in the previous paragraph. After a short pause, the screen will refresh and you will be informed that the transaction was completed successfully and your account was created.

At this point irrespectively, you will be redirected to the home page. Look at the menu on the left, if there are several new entries there such as "Manage Domains" and "Billing" then everything has gone well and you can use this opportunity to take your favourite beverage.

We have covered a fair bit of information in this article, particularly if you are new to Internet publishing. Congratulate yourself on a job well done and when you are ready the next lessons await.

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