Downloads

[michaelfeb16]

I would like to be able to have my visitors download small files(10-70KB) from my website. How would I go about setting this up?

[Kevin]

Depending on what kind of files they are and how you want them published it can be easy or hard.

You could simply make a directory and dump the files in. Anyone hitting the directory would get a listing of the files and could download any of them.

You could also make an html page and link to the files (<A href="http://.../file">click here</A>).

You could also go beyond that with streaming and/or password protected directories.

[michaelfeb16]

I made a link to the file like you have shown in your reply, and this works for one or two of the files; however, for the rest illegible text is shown in the browser.

For what it matters, they are torrent files.

[Kevin]

You probably need to add:
AddType application/x-bittorrent .torrent
to a .htaccess file (in that directory or a parent of it) to make .torrent files work.

[michaelfeb16]

Thanks for the reply, but I cannot find that file anywhere. I searched every directory on my site to no avail.

[sheila]

The .htaccess files are not included on your site by default. When your hosting package is first set up there are no .htaccess files within the /www folder.

You can create one yourself. Just use a simple text editor, or perhaps even better, the File Manager in your CNC.

If you want this directive to apply to your entire website, then place the .htaccess file in your root /www folder.

It is extremely important that the file be named exactly .htaccess
Anything else will not be properly recognized by the Apache web server.

[michaelfeb16]

Thanks for sticking with me through this problem.

However, this didn't work. I made the ".htaccess" file just as named and added the line exactly as shown in the above post. No change however.

The situation remains the same as before. A few of the torrent files will download fine, but most just turn up unintelligible text as shown in this image. http://i3.tinypic.com/48x5yqw.jpg

[sheila]

Did you leave an extra blank line in your .htaccess file at the end?
I should have probably mentioned that...but you need an extra blank line at the end of the file in order for Apache to parse and process that file...

[michaelfeb16]

Is there anything else specific like that that I may be missing? Anything specific to FQ?

I didn't have the extra line, but putting it in did not change anything.

[kitchin]

.htaccess should be uploaded as ASCII/text. You can make the last line #, the comment character, to be sure it is there.

AddType application/x-bittorrent .torrent
#


In other words, if you are using Windows, your local file size should be one or two bytes larger than the file size on the web server.

What is a torrent file supposed to look like, anyway? Isn't is binary just like your screen shot?
<edit>
Whatever, http://www.bittorrent.org/protocol.html
</edit>

[michaelfeb16]

I want them to download the file, not have that information displayed in the browser.

I made the last line a #, but that had no effect.

basically, the link is:
http://www.mysite.com/folder/file.torrent

[michaelfeb16]

Well, I can't say that I figured out why I was not getting anything to work from your suggestions, but I worked around the problem for myself.

I had a separate folder in my directory in which I wanted to keep the files to be downloaded. As I experimented to figure out this problem, I found out that if I keep the files in the same folder as the link to them, the download worked fine. This makes me think something was screwy with the links in my site.

Anyway, thank you very much for all your help. You guys are more supportive and helpful than I would have ever expected. Knowing me, I can predict that you will see me back for more help far too soon.