While I agree that joining a league to get experience would be helpful, there's nothing wrong with learning as you go. However, try to fill your league with
your friends who'll agree to live with any mistakes that happen as you learn what you're doing as a commissioner. Most of the online players who frequent these forums will quickly notice a beginner and will not tolerate too many beginner mistakes from a commissioner. But it's just a game right!?
First of all, make sure you run OOTP on a very good computer, with as much RAM as possible and a fast processor if possible. Although OOTP can be run with the minimum requirements in a computer, I don't recommend it if you plan on being a commissioner. You want to avoid game crashes and slow downs as much as possible.
As for your running an online league & uploading to a website follow these instructions:
1. Get the highest speed internet connection possible.
2. Make some adjustments in your pc to free up RAM. (see my post in "Pc slow or bogging down?")
3. Defragment your hard drive.
4. Sign up and
pay for a reliable webhost that supports ftp in an area near you. If you live in California, sign up with a webhost based in California. (Free sites rarely support ftp)
5. Create a subdomain NOT just a folder on your website with the name
reports (just an example!). Now your website's URL is
www.you.com and your league reports will be at
www.reports.you.com.
6. Now in the ftp settings in OOTP6,
FTP SERVER ADDRESS:
www.reports.you.com
USER NAME:
reports@you.com (verify the username when creating subdomain)
PASSWORD:********(verify the password when creating subdomain)
LOCAL STARTING DIR: / (that's right, just a simple slash!!)
PORT: 21
7. Now create and publish your league website main pages to
www.you.com. Here is where you can have your league news, and resources. Make sure to have a navigation bar with a nice simple link to
www.reports.you.com.
8. Create a folder on your website called "league file". Here is where you'll upload your *zipped league file for other OOTP users to download so they can run their teams. The league file will have the ftp settings already input so other GM's will simply hit "export" and you can just hit "import teams" before your scheduled sim. Then be sure to put a link to you league file on your main page of
www.you.com
9. If you need a good ftp program download Filezilla at:
http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/ it's free and great for transferring files from your computer to your website.
While there are different ways to organize your website and folders in it, the key is to
keep them organized. I simply present a simple way of doing it.