Cleaning up your Server Area
This is an explanation of how to organize your projects for this class.
On the server, at Brand X Internet in Santa Monica, each student has been assigned a web folder. Inside this folder we will create one subfolder for each of our projects.
Here's how to examine your web area on the server, and to clean it up, if that's needed.
First, if you have not already done so, create a new site coniguration on your local server and connect it to the server as follows
Choose "Site -> Manage Sites -> New" and call your site something that is easy to understand, such as "Jim Pickrell CAOT 112". When the computer asks how you want to connect to the server, use "FTP". Fill in your username and password. Most of the other blanks in the site setup can be ignored.
Now have a look at the remote view of the server. You do this by selecting "Remove View" from the Files panel as shown in the following picture:
If you look at this panel, near the top, you see a Site Selector button (currently set to Jim Pickrell) and a View Selector (currently set to "Remote View).
You can open folders to see what is in them by clicking on the little gray triangles.
You can vew the files on the computer in front of you by changing "Remote View" to "Local View".
You can switch to a different site by changing the site selection box (upper left in file panel).
If for some reason the file panel is not showing, you can turn it on by looking at the "Window" menu and making sure the "Files" window is checked.
The most common problems are trying to connect to a web folder that doesn't exist, or wrong username or password.
You can create a new folder by right clicking on the first line in the file panel (starts with a "/") and then select "New Folder" from the menu that pops up.
You can upload a file by selecting it and then hitting the up arrow icon.
You can delete a file by selecting it and then choosing "Right Click -> Edit -> Delete". This works on either the local or remote server but remember if you delete it on one side and not on the other, it will be a little bit confusing.
You can move files to a folder by dragging them in the remote view (or the local view). Note that if you move things around in one view it won't move them in the other, so you have to re-download the file/folder/site if you move things around and then want to work on them. Be sure to test all the links and make sure they work.
Another strategy is to move things around in the local view, get them the way you want them, and then re-upload them. This works fine. One advantage to this is that in the local view, if hyperlinks change because of you moving files around, Dreamweaver will fix the links (and will confirm with you that this is ok.)
What I have done here with my projects is to create a folder for each project and then move all the files that go with that project, into the appropriate folder.
If you look at the picture above, you can see that I have one site with four subsites, each in its own subfolder.
That's exactly how to set up the sites in Dreamweaver. When I start a new project I need to go into the main project, create a new folder, and then create a site configuration to load files into that folder. If I set up the site configuration first, and then test the connection, it won't work, because it can't find the folder and isn't smart enough to make a new folder for you. Each site will have the same ftp information, such as server, username, and password, but the folder will be different: project1, project2, etc. The site configurations are found in the menu under "Site -> New" or under "Site -> Manage Sites -> New".
If you work on the same computer every day, you only need to change this setup when you start a new sub-site. When that happens, just create a folder in the master site, then create the Dreamweaver Site Configuration for the subsite.
In our lab however, things are a bit more complicated because the hard disk is wiped every time the computer is restarted. However most of the time there's just one site you are working on so that's really the only one you need to set up in Dreamweaver. It would be possible to download the master site and all the subsites, but if you're not using them it's probably not worth the trouble, just leave them alone on the server. You can download them when you need them.