Lab 7 Writeup

Be importunate—IT people need to know where to go to get help because IT details change all the time.

In Lab 6, you created home pages for yourself, but the only way that you could view it was to use a browser to open up the files directly from your F: drive. No one else could see it unless you sent them the files. This, of course, misses the whole point of the World Wide Web: to make websites conveniently available to other people. In this lab, we'll remedy this by publishing your homesite to Calvin's webserver.

Reload Your Site Definition

Use the instructions in Project 6 to load your website definition.

Publishing Your Website

We'll now tell Dreamweaver how/where to publish your website; this is done by changing your site definition:

  1. Choose "Site"-"Manage Sites".
  2. Select your site and click "Edit".
  3. Hit "Next" until you get to the "Sharing Files" page.
  4. Set the values on this page appropriately, using the following diagram as an example:

    The only changes you're allowed to make are to use your own username as the FTP login (of course) and you can use anything for the lab6/ (see the Privacy section below).
  5. Hit "Next" until you can (and do) hit "Finish".

Immediately save your new site definition since some of its settings have changed:

Then, you can instruct Dreamweaver to upload your website as shown in this diagram:


Enter your email password (but don't click "save"). If Windows's firewall complains, unblock Dreamweaver. If Dreamweaver gives you errors about creating new directories, just click "OK" to them.

You (and everyone else) should then be able to view your website on Calvin's webserver as follows:

Replace lab6 with whatever you used in the site definition above.

Once you get the site loaded into your browser, navigate through the site to make sure it all works. It is very likely that some things that work on your computer may not work when the site is published. You have to find the errors by going through the site yourself.

Some Troubleshooting Tips

If nothing comes up, here are some things to check:

Privacy

If you don't feel good about publishing your personal information or picture on the web, then feel free to change the information before publishing it. The grader doesn't care whether the information is accurate or not.

You can also publish it to somewhere very difficult to find. That is, when you set up the publishing, use public_html/fasdfkweir or something else non-sensical starting with public_html/. (Stick to just letters and digits though, no punctuation or spaces!) Then everyone (including yourself) will have to use the non-sensical part to access your site. It's unlikely anyone would ever find it without you telling them.

Informational Website

The informational website that you started (or will be starting) for Project 6 is in a subfolder of your website. It comes along for the ride! So you should be able to find it as well. If Vander Linden put his in a folder named informational, his URL would be: http://www.calvin.edu/~kvlinden/lab6/informational/.

Submitting your Work

Submit the URL of your published home page in the "Comments" field of your KnightVision submission for Lab 7. (Hint: pull the page up in a browser, and then copy-and-paste it into the "Comments" field.)

You will be graded only on your home page, your schedule, and the image from Lab 6 (not anything that you're working on for Projects 6 and 7).

Do not submit the .html and image files that you produced and submitted as Lab 6. You get no credit if you don't submit a working URL. We reserve the right to re-grade you on Lab 6 issues (like working links, visible images, good looking tables, etc.).