Tutorial

*cheery wave*

The first tutorial shows how you can get files from the remote server (that's my server, drongo) onto your computer for editing. You use WinSCP to do this. (You also use WinSCP to get the files back onto drongo when you've finished editing.)

Start WinSCP. I have it on my Windows desktop so I start it by double-clicking the icon.

Select the Basic tab and fill in the information below. (The password is the one I gave you a couple of weeks ago.) Don't click the Login button yet.

Then go to the Advanced tab. Make sure that the settings look the same as this.

Then go to the Stored sessions tab. (You can see some of my other logins for drongo on this screenshot.) Click the Save button. By default it will probably suggest hetrez@drongo.grouse.net.au as the session name. This is fine. Click OK. Then, with that session name selected, click Login.

(Next time you run WinSCP, you can go straight to the Stored sessions tab, select your hetrez session name, click Login and go straight in. You only have to do the setup stuff once.)

Now you are logged in to drongo.grouse.net.au, our server. You can see the main WinSCP session window.

On the left is your local computer (mine is called Reptile). On the right is your home directory on drongo. Have a click around, open folders to see what's in them, whatever takes your fancy. As long as you don't start dragging files around yet, you'll be fine.

You copy files from one place to another just by selecting them and dragging them to where you want them to be.

Set up a folder on your local computer (probably your C: drive) where you are going to store your working files. I have a folder called webdev. You can call yours whatever you like, but I'm going to refer to it as webdev in this tutorial.

All the live files for your website are stored in the www.very folder on drongo. Anything you want to appear on the website has to go in the www.very folder. For example, a file called index.shtml stored directly under your www.very folder appears as http://very.net/~hetrez/index.shtml on the live Internet.

You can only see the files in your account, and you can't break anyone else's site. You can do whatever you like here, since it's all yours and we don't place any restrictions on people we choose to host. You can make subfolders there, store images, music, whatever takes your fancy.

(If you want to store a lot of stuff, have a chat to me first so that I can make sure there is enough space. However, if it's just stories, you can go berserk because you can have huge novels-worth of plain text and hardly make a dent.)

Copy everything in the www.very folder on drongo to your webdev folder. You now have a 'mirror' of your site on your local computer. This is where you will make and test your changes before putting them on the live Internet.

The next tutorial explains how your site is structured.