Silly question (perhaps not)

[mbdevelopments]

Have just managed to get my ISP to let me set Actinic up so am now in the position of being able to upload my site for testing etc.

Am I right in thinking that no-one will be able to see it until I link to it from my existing site or does Actinic try and overwrite the index page?

I will be beta testing for several week (months!!) and want to keep it hidden until it is spot on.

Ian

[pinbrook]

actinic installs itself into a folder called acatalog.

so to see your site you will have to type in www.domain.co.uk/acatalog

when you go live you will place an index page at the root of the domain, until you do this anyone typing in the doamin name will see the directory structure and then could click through. Your best plan is to place a temporary index page in the root, annoucing the launch - xxx website coming soon!

[mbdevelopments]

That is as I suspected.
The main site is well established and is busy but I wanted to keep the ecommerce section hidden.

So as long as I don't link to it and no-one guesses the address I suppose I will be alright.
I've set the thing does the the site search function to avoid spidering the cgi-bin and acatalog folders.

Thanks,

Ian

[allen]

The only exception is if you tell Actinic to use one of your brochure pages as the 'Home Page' (tick box on bottom of brochure dialog), then this will overwrite your index.html.

Often you will find that the ISP will put a holding page on your domain, but it's usually something like 'This domain is reserved'.

Allen

[james]

You may have done this already, but to prevent search engines like Google indexing your site, add a robots.txt file to your site visit robotstxt.org for information on how to do this.

http://www.robotstxt.org/

[mbdevelopments]

Thanks for that.
I've stopped the on-site search engine looking at the acatalog directory but had forgotten about robots.txt.

thanks,

Ian

[yvonne]

Password instead of robot.txt

Actually I wouldn't use robot.txt for this as it's a sure way to invite hackers to try it as they seems to think if you restrict access it must be because there's something of interest to them there. Besides, how do you expect a search spider to find a certain site folder unless you have a link to it from somewhere else on your site? They don't guess your web structure you know and I've never heard they can access your site from an administrators point of view unless there's something wrong with your setup!

Set a .htpasswd instead for password protection as only those with the password can access your store section. When you're ready to go live simply remove the .htpasswd file from the Actinic folder.

yvonne