Fantastiblog

When you are running your own Wordpress blog on H-Sphere you will eventually want to install a new theme. What makes this interesting is that WebShell, the tool allowing file access to your H-Sphere hosting account, doesn’t appear to allow you to upload a directory (folder) from your computer. Since a Wordpress theme can contain many files (and even a few folders) this presents a sticky situation. Do you want to upload all those files 10 at a time? No? I don’t either.

What we need is a little lateral thinking. Now, if you have a static IP address you could turn on FTP and upload that way, but what if that’s not an option either? As fortune would have it, WebShell allows us to use a wonderful tool called ‘wget’, which is more or less short for ‘web get’ - a very tricky name indeed. What could it mean? Simply it allows us to grab any file that you can click to in a web browser and copy it into your WebShell. Now do you see where we are going?

The best way to get the theme in is to first navigate to your blog/wp-contents/themes directory in WebShell. Next, try to find the original URL of your theme on the web (this will usually be a .zip archive, which is great for this job.) Now use the ‘WGET’ button that you see at the bottom of the WebShell page. Just paste in the URL of the theme’s archive, click ‘get’ and wait. Once your theme has been transferred to your WebShell, click on it once and then use the ‘uncompress’ button to, well, uncompress the archive. Now your theme will be ready to use.

What if you cannot find a nice link to the archive?

Sometimes the download link is obscured behind a link like this :
http://themes.wordpress.net/download.php?theme=2575
and WebShell will only get you a file like ‘download.php’ - which isn’t very helpful.

Fear not! This is where your ISP’s free web hosting space comes in handy. Remember that? Most ISP’s do provide you with free web space on their site, usually something like : ‘members.ispname.com/yourname’ go and check now, you probably do have it available.

Now that you have your free web space ready, upload the archive there and go back to the previous step. This time, however, replace the original URL of the theme archive with the URL to the archive in your account at your ISP. Easy.