I have been using Weebly for a while now, and I am quite happy. As a free service (with some forced self advertisement and limitations), Weebly does not offer a way to statically put files to your webpage. It makes sense as this is related to hosting, which one should be paying, but provided freely (as a subdomain of Weebly) by Weebly.
However, what if you already have a domain and hosting? In my case I already had hosting from GoDaddy and I bought a domain from GoDaddy, too. Weebly plays very nicely if you want to use your existing domain. You just have to forward your domain's IP to Weebly's IP. There are many articles, including this one.
So far so good, but what if you want to use your existing domain and continue hosting files under your domain. Well, this is the point where everything breaks down. As your domain redirects to Weebly by default, all existing files in your domain (that were uploaded by FTP) also point to Weebly, however they don't have counterparts (and cannot have) under Weebly's domain, so everything fells apart.
At this point one can ask: why would you even need this? Well, in my case, a portion of my webpage is auto-generated from a database and the generated HTML code needs static links. When you add a file through Weebly's menu, you get a weird hashed link such as:
http://www.kivancmuslu.com/uploads/1/8/0/4/18042401/6891725.png?135
which is almost impossible to statically encode in your HTML generator. Even if you don't generate HTML code, you could still want a static link for files that change frequently in your webpage so that you can change those files through FTP, without the need to republish your webpage. By static links, I mean something along the lines:
http://files.kivancmuslu.com/Publications/2012/MusluBHEN2012oopsla.bib
(e.g., more readable, more structural, does not change)
Now that I explained the problem, I can tell you that there is a (somewhat neat) workaround for this problem. You have to create a subdomain in your domain (I have created http://files.kivancmuslu.com and pointed it to /files folder) and then in your DNS settings make sure that your subdomain points to your actual (original) domain IP address (which should be default). Instructions to create the sub-domain (it was tricky for me to find it, even the second time). This way you should have two A-entries in your DNS management (note, this is just for verification, you do not really need to change anything manually here):
Questions or problems, let me know!
However, what if you already have a domain and hosting? In my case I already had hosting from GoDaddy and I bought a domain from GoDaddy, too. Weebly plays very nicely if you want to use your existing domain. You just have to forward your domain's IP to Weebly's IP. There are many articles, including this one.
So far so good, but what if you want to use your existing domain and continue hosting files under your domain. Well, this is the point where everything breaks down. As your domain redirects to Weebly by default, all existing files in your domain (that were uploaded by FTP) also point to Weebly, however they don't have counterparts (and cannot have) under Weebly's domain, so everything fells apart.
At this point one can ask: why would you even need this? Well, in my case, a portion of my webpage is auto-generated from a database and the generated HTML code needs static links. When you add a file through Weebly's menu, you get a weird hashed link such as:
http://www.kivancmuslu.com/uploads/1/8/0/4/18042401/6891725.png?135
which is almost impossible to statically encode in your HTML generator. Even if you don't generate HTML code, you could still want a static link for files that change frequently in your webpage so that you can change those files through FTP, without the need to republish your webpage. By static links, I mean something along the lines:
http://files.kivancmuslu.com/Publications/2012/MusluBHEN2012oopsla.bib
(e.g., more readable, more structural, does not change)
Now that I explained the problem, I can tell you that there is a (somewhat neat) workaround for this problem. You have to create a subdomain in your domain (I have created http://files.kivancmuslu.com and pointed it to /files folder) and then in your DNS settings make sure that your subdomain points to your actual (original) domain IP address (which should be default). Instructions to create the sub-domain (it was tricky for me to find it, even the second time). This way you should have two A-entries in your DNS management (note, this is just for verification, you do not really need to change anything manually here):
- @ (main domain) should map to Weebly's IP (so that your webpage redirects to the page you build at Weebly).
- files (your new subdomain) should map to your actual (original) domain address (so that whenever you link from this subdomain, it does not redirect to Weebly, but finds the file in your actual domain).
Questions or problems, let me know!
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