This is the 14th post in the Articulate 101 series. It was written by Articulate Director of Customer Support Gabe Anderson.

It’s been a few years since I last wrote about how to FTP your Articulate Presenter content to your Web server, so here’s a fresh look at how to get your published Presenter content from your computer to your Web server for your target audience to see.

Requirements & Preparation

First, a few basic requirements for getting your content onto a Web server:

• A licensed copy of Articulate Presenter, of course
• An Internet connection
• A 3rd-party FTP application (if you’re not using Presenter for FTP), such as FTP Voyager (that’s what I use)
• Write access to a Web server (Windows/IIS or Linux/Apache will work fine)

Next, you’ll want to check with your Web host to ensure that your server can support the following:

• HTML files (I’ve never known a Web host that doesn’t!)
• JavaScript (.js) files
• XML files
• Flash (.SWF and/or .FLV) files

Those are the basic file types that make up the published output of Articulate Presenter content.

Additionally, if you’re using a Windows/IIS server and have added any Flash video (.FLV) to your Presenter or Engage content, you’ll need to make sure you add the .FLV MIME type to your server. This should be pretty easy for any Web host or server admin to do, and Dave has outlined on his blog how to do it.

Publishing or Uploading Your Content to Your Web Site

So now that your content is ready to go and your Web site awaits, it’s time to upload your content. There are two basic methods for uploading your content to the Web:

1. Publish Using Presenter’s Built-in FTP Feature

The below demo outlines the basics of how to publish directly from PowerPoint using Presenter’s built-in FTP feature:

2. Publish Locally & Upload via FTP

This tutorial shows you how to publish your Presenter project locally, then upload the published output to your Web site using your favorite FTP application:

Note: If you’re using Vista and/or PowerPoint 2007 (Presenter 5.3), then you should use method 2 above (manual upload) since there’s a known issue in Presenter 5.3 where the built-in FTP feature may not work as expected. Publish to FTP issue fixed in April 2008 release of Presenter 5.3 (Vista/PowerPoint 2007 SP1 compatibility update).

If you run into any issues with playback on your Web site, here are some common causes that you’ll want to verify:

• Did all of your files fully upload? Compare your local output to what’s on your server.
• Does your Web host really support XML? Even if you think they do, double-check. (Presenter troubleshooting | Quizmaker troubleshooting)
• Did you upload using binary, not ASCII? The XML files generated by Articulate products are Unicode, which means they need to be transferred via binary in order to retain their proper encoding.

Follow these steps and you’ll be publishing and uploading content for your target audience to view via a simple URL in no time!

Of course, if you don’t have your own Web host or don’t want to bother with all this FTP stuff, then Articulate Online may be an even easier solution for you.

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