Frequently Asked Questions

Your Ripway Account

Sign Up
Signup is easy--we don't ask for any personal information, and your email address will be kept private. Use the "Sign Up" link on the blue menu, and enter a username, and a password to sign up.

Log In
Just enter your username and password in the login box, on either the home page, or the Log In page. You can choose to store your username and password as "cookies" on your computer, so the next time you visit our site you won't have to enter the information again. To do this, select the checkbox marked "Save Login Info on this Computer?"

Storage and Bandwidth Limits

Coming soon.

Uploading Files

You can create your own folders to organize your files as you go (See section below on managing files). Or, you can upload files into the "root" of your site, not into a folder.

There is an "Upload Files" button at the top of each page. Select that link, and the next page will contain six input boxes and "Browse" buttons. Use the Browse button to look for the file on your computer that you wish to upload and store here. When you've found the file you want, double-click it.

If you have more files to upload, move on to the next input box, and repeat the step above to locate and select your file.

When you've selected up to six files to be uploaded, click the "Upload" button to begin the process of moving the files from your computer to our site. When the process is complete, you'll see a report of the files uploaded, their file sizes, and whether or not the upload was successful.

FTP Access
You can upload and download files to and from your account with FTP access! Use the following FTP connection information in your favorite FTP software (such as CuteFTP):

If you have problems connection, it could be because you're behind a firewall that blocks active mode FTP. You should set your FTP software to use "PASV" mode and/or enable "Firewall" mode. Refer to the documentation for your FTP software for switching to passive and firewall modes.

Managing Files

You can create folders, to organize your files. From the "My Files" page, enter the name of the folder you wish to create (alphanumeric characters only, please) next to the "Create Subfolder" button, and click the submit button.

Use the links to the right of any file to rename or copy the file, or if its a text-based file, use the Edit link to modify the file.

Hotlinking/Direct Linking/External Linking

If you wish to place a files in your account on another website, such as an image, Flash animation, WAV file, etc., we provide the web URL right underneath each filename. That page will give you the URL you need to use for either linking directly to your files from other pages, or for placing directly into the HTML for other web pages.

Account Usage, Locking, and Limits
Different account plans have various limits on the number of hits they can get to their files by other users, as well as limits to the amount of files you can store in your account. Each time somebody downloads a file from your account, your hourly usage increases. If the total usage for the last 24 hours exceeds your plan limit, your account will "lock", and downloads from your account will no longer function. You will still be able to log in and upload files, and access your own files.

Downloads from your a ccount will automatically be unlocked when the total usage over the last 24 hours drops below your plan limit.

Downloads Locked?

Each account has a limited amount of data transfer permitted in a 24 hour period. Deleting files from your account won't help. This does not include uploads to your account, but only downloads of your files. Without these limits we would be giving away unlimited bandwidth, which is simply not possible to do; the bandwidth costs would run us out of business in a few months.

If you've exceeded your daily data transfer limit, check the 24 hour chart on your account page, it will indicate to you how much data transfer has been generated by downloads of your files in the last 24 hours, and will help you see how long it will be until your total usage is below your account's limit. Once the total falls below your limit, your downloads will be unlocked within an hour.

Note that downloads can occur even if you aren't using our site! Any time you post images, song files, media, videos, etc., hosted by Ripway onto other websites, those pages can be viewed by people at any time - a person viewing a website, which includes an image hosted on Ripway, is downloading that image, even if they aren't actively choosing to do so. Any time files are sent from our system to a person viewing a page with files hosted by us, "downloads" are happening and your usage will reflect this.

How do I put a song on my web page?

Once you have a music or video file uploaded, use the "Get Codes" link next to the file, on the My Files page, to generate EMBED tags that can be used on other sites to play the video file. You can adjust the width and height tags in the code we give to either hide, or enlarge the player and its controls, which will appear on the page after you add the codes.

Building a Website

Default HTML Documents, Home Pages
You can create a home page that you can share with others by providing them the URL to your a page uploaded to your account.

This can be done with any HTML file, no matter what it's named (such as "home.html"), but is easiest if you create a "default document" in the your account. When you have a default document, you don't have to specify a filename, just the path to the folder, which we provide at the top of the "My Files" page.

A default document is an HTML file that must be named index.htm, index.html, or index.php. This can be created with any number of HTML utilities, our "Create Index" or "Create Text File" features, or even just a text editor. Once you have a default document, you can share the URL to the folder from the top of the My Files page, instead of the full URL to the file, and the default document will be automatically loaded.

Creating Web Pages with Ripway Templates and Content Marker Tags (New!)
You can create entire websites with Ripway, using simple "Template" files and special "Content Marker Tags".

A template file is simply an HTML file that contains special "Content Marker Tags" indicate content areas. Though we'll be adding a selection of pre-built templates you can select from, you can create your own template files easily. Rename any standard HTML file to have a ".TPL" file extension and upload it to your account.

Edit the TPL file with the "Edit" link to the right of the filename on the "My Files" page. In your Template file, replace areas where you want content inserted, such as a title on the page, a daily update, a links area, etc., with a "Content Marker Tag," as shown below. The Content Marker Tag indicates the name of a text file that will contain your content which will be "stuffed" into the published HTML file. While Content Marker Tags can be used multiple times on a page, you'll need to use a unique file for each different bit of content.

Example INDEX.TPL file:

<HTML><BODY>
<P><B><!--RIPWAY-INCLUDE:"title.txt"--></B>
<P><!--RIPWAY-INCLUDE:"content.txt"-->
<P><!--RIPWAY-INCLUDE:"footer.txt"-->
<P><!--RIPWAY-DATEPUBLISHED-->
</BODY></HTML>

The RIPWAY-INCLUDE directive tells the publishing system to include the contents of a text file into the template.

Specify the file(s) that will contain the content in Content Marker Tag(s), as indicated above. For the example above, you would create a "title.txt" file with the page title, a "content.txt" file, and a "footer.txt" file. Each of these files would contain the content you wish to be inserted into the template when you publish the file. The result of the published template is a complete HTML file with all of your content in place.

The content file to be included has to reside in the same folder as the template file (any folder paths will be stripped).

You can have as many different content files as you wish, and you can use as many Content Marker Tags in a template file as you wish.

Then, either create or upload the content files--these are simple TXT files, and must end with a ".txt" extension.

The RIPWAY-DATEPUBLISHED directive will insert the current date/time when you publish the template. More Content Marker Tag commands will be added in the future.

When your Template file is ready, and your content files are uploaded or created in the same folder as the template, use the "Publish" link to the right of the Template filename on the "My Files" page, to generate the HTML versions of the file.

Warning: Any existing HTML file with the same name will be overwritten when you publish!

Blogging Features (beta release test!)
Our publishing system, above, also supports "Blogging", or "Web Log" features. To enable this feature, you need a template file (with a TPL extension) using standard "Blogger" markup tags. Click here for an example.

Blogger template files use tags such as <$BlogOwnerFirstName$> to define content insertion points. The entry section of the template must begin and end with <blogger> and </blogger> markup tags. Contained within those tags are content insertion tags, such as

<$BlogDateHeaderDate$>
<$BlogItemTitle$>
<$BlogItemBody$>
<$BlogItemDateTime$>
<$BlogItemAuthorNickname$>

<$BlogOwnerFirstName$>
<$BlogOwnerLastName$>
<$BlogOwnerFullName$>
<$BlogOwnerEmail$>
<$BlogTitle$>

If using an existing Blogger format template, rename the file's "HTML" extension to a "TPL" extension. Publishing abilities will then be available for it.

Blogger-style blog templates have several common features. There is a set of "tags" that get populated with data from your entries, and from a global file. The global file contains information such as your blog's title, your first, last, and full name, and the email address you want to appear:

Create a textfile in the same directory as your TPL file, named blogdetails.txt, exactly as shown below, but substituting your information between the starting and ending tags. You can cut and paste this into a text editor (like notepad, or our online "Create Textfile" form, name it "BlogDetails.txt", and change the data to your own information.

<BlogOwnerFirstName>Your First Name</BlogOwnerFirstName>
<BlogOwnerLastName>Your Last Name</BlogOwnerLastName>
<BlogTitle>Your Blog's Title</BlogTitle>
<BlogOwnerFullName>Your Full Name</BlogOwnerFullName>
<BlogOwnerEmail>Your Email Address</BlogOwnerEmail>
<BlogDescription>A description of your blog page</BlogDescription>
<BlogURL>The complete URL to your blog</BlogURL>
<BlogArchiveURL>The complete URL to your blog's archive</BlogArchiveURL>
<BlogArchiveName>The name of your blog archive page</BlogArchiveName>

Now, create individual blog entries with the "Create Block Entry" link on the toolbar above the file list on the "My Files" page. Enter the title of your entry, the body of the entry, and a user nickname. Submit the form to create the entry file, which will appear on the "My Files" file list. You can edit the files directly with the "Edit" link to the right of each file.

After creating a blog entry file, you can "publish" the TPL template by clicking the "Publish" link to the right of the template file, and your entry should appear in the published HTML version of the file.

Archive pages can be created by copying the main template file to a filename containing the word "archive", such as "blogarchive.tpl". Rename old blog entries by adding a ".old" extension to the filename to make them archived entries, then republish the main template page and the archive page to move items from to the archive page. (We'll have auto-archiving added soon.)

We will soon have forms to allow you easily edit entries, and the global detail files. For now, you can download some free Blogger templates from http://blogtemplates.noipo.org/.

PHP Scripts

We support PHP, PHP3, and PHTML scripts. You can find free PHP scripts at HotScripts.com.

Privacy Issue with PHP Applications
Please be aware that any file in your account can be downloaded if its full path and filename is known (with the exception of PHP scripts, that execute on the server).

File locations are especially known in the case of published Open Source, Freeware and Shareware applications.

For any data files used, consider to disguise the original directory (folder) and file names by recoding them to something difficult to guess.

Submitted by Richard