What if a class included an assignment which no one really knew how to accomplish?
I suppose that’d be one way to describe the current web site project in class. The assignment seemed simple: create a personal web page and send a link to the professor. The requirements were clear as were the tasks needed in order to design the web page. Examples and resources were provided so that people could get ideas for their own web pages. It was all quite well organized right up until it came time to post the pages.
The site wherein we were to post our pages was rather cryptic. You were supposed to login to a site with no real way to login to a site. Oh yeah, be sure to download WinSCP to upload your files. What no one told us is that you won’t be able to login the the site until AFTER you’ve logged in through WinSCP.
So, yes there was some confusion. It took me a few minutes to figure it all out and I’ve been doing my best to help my class mates get through the cloud as well. With that in mind, I created a document to walk one very quickly throught the process. It was rapidly assembled and, in reality, not ready for any significant distribution. But alas, I find that time is short today, so I’ll live with it as is. I’m adding it here as well (mostly because it’s a handy and timely topic for this week’s blog post).
Download WinSCP from www.sourceforge.net. You’ll want the “portable executable” from the downloads section. Install it by double-clicking the .exe file. I chose the Norton Commander style because I prefer the side-by-side window view.
When the install is complete, leave the “launch WinSCP” box checked and it will pop up with this screen:
As shown, the hostname is classes.lt.unt.edu. Leave the port number at its default setting of 22. User name should be your UNT ID. Enter your password. Click Save so you won’t have to re-enter your info. Click Login to be connected to the site. When it connects, it will give you a seemingly alarming message like this:
Don’t panic, just click Yes and it will happily stroll along to the screen where you can actually get some work done. It will look like this:
At this point, you’re ready to push your files across. On the right window pane, double click the courses folder to change to it, then double click the 2008_Fall folder and finally, the LTEC3440020 folder.
Create a new folder for your website. It really doesn’t matter what you call it. Once you create it, double click it to change to it.
Drag your website files across from the left pane to the right pane. You’ll get a dialog box asking what you want to do, just click Copy.
Once copied, you’re essentially done in WinSCP. Open a browser and wander over to the http://classes.lt.unt.edu site and login. Yes, you’ll actually get to login now. You’ll see our class listed at the top under Fall 2008. Click the link to go to our class’ folder.
Now you’ll notice that you see the folder you created in WinSCP. Click it. In the next page, you’ll find your web site files. It will look something like this (but with more than just the one file I show here):
If you click on your index.htm file, your site should open right up. Copy the link from the browser window that opened and submit it to Dr. Enriquez. It will look something like this:
Test all of your links and tweak them as needed. Once they all work, you’re done! Have a great holiday.
