Taking control of your website (Activity 4)

Written by: Jonathan Briggs

October 22, 2008 [3092 views]

Taking control of your website (Activity 4)

Deadline: Tuesday 28th October, midnight

Very impressed that so many of you are keeping up with all of the activities so far and for those who have fallen a little behind, don’t worry, we will provide some additional help to allow you to catch up.

A few of you are clearly racing ahead and that is fine too. Don’t feel restricted by the activities. They are simply milestones that I would like you to show that you can complete. If you want to be running a fully ecommerce enabled, social network that is mashable, geocoded and has its own viral affiliate scheme then please go ahead.

In order to do this Activity 4 you must have successfully completed Activity 3 and have your own site/blog running successfully with WordPress and have access to your hosting space (preferably running cPanel).

In this activity we want you to enhance your site with new themes, images, embedded video and links to other interesting places on the web. But to do these tasks you will need to be able to upload files and move them around within your hosting space and this will be the focus of the first part.

Part 1

Your hosting space provides you with a filing system just like the one on your local computer. Unlike your local computer however moving files around is a little more complicated because usually you cannot just drag and drop files from one folder into another.

If you are using cPanel however you will be provided with a variety of tools for moving, uploading and even creating files within your hosting environment. These include File Manager, FTP and Web Disk; File Manager is particularly useful if you want to make small changes (one at a time), while learning about FTP will be the most useful in the long term.

If for any reason you are not using cPanel then FTP will almost certainly be useful in managing the files within your hosting space.

Tasks

Find some images and other documents that you can upload to your hosting space. You will need to store them on your local machine. Images may be taken with a camera (and uploaded) or downloaded from the web (but find images that are “copyright free” such as those on http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/ or http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp)
Explore File Manager and Web Disk (students without cPanel will need to look at any other tools they have been given for uploading and manipulating files). Work out how to upload these images to your hosting space and how to delete them. You will incorporate them into your web pages in Part 2.
Explore FTP.

FTP or File Transfer Protocol is a bit more complicated but extremely useful and will allow you eventually to develop software, locally, on your own machine and then transfer all the necessary files to your hosting server. Here are a couple of tutorials that should help explain FTP:

http://www.ftpplanet.com/ftpresources/basics.htm
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/ftp

To use FTP you will need an extra piece of software on your own local machine. This is an FTP client and there are lots of free versions out there as well as commercial versions. Have a look at some of these.

SmartFTP (Windows)
Filezilla (Many Platforms)
FireFTP(FTP extension to Firefox)

Before you can transfer files anywhere to and from your hosting server you will need to make sure that you have given yourself (and perhaps others) the correct permissions. Inside cPanel you will find an application called FTP Accounts and this will let you set up login and password details to give to your FTP client. There is probably a tutorial video with this application and you will probably also find that some default “users” have already been set up.

If you are not using cPanel then you will need to read your host’s FTP instructions to see how FTP accounts are configured.

You will also come across the concept of “anonymous FTP” which you should experiment with. Notice that when you set up an FTP account you always tell your hosting server which parts of your server can be accessed.

To understand FTP you should make sure that you have done the following:

Downloaded and configured an FTP client
Added an account to your hosting server
Connected your FTP client to your hosting server (using the new account)
Connected your FTP client to your hosting server (using anonymous FTP)
Transferred some images (or other documents) between your local computer and your hosting server (using FTP)

To complete this activity (which might take 1-2 hours) you should answer the following questions and then fill in the feedback survey (as usual):

1. I managed to transfer files using
a. File Manager
b. Web Disk
c. FTP (anonymous)
d. FTP (new user)
e. Another tool (non cPanel)

2. Which FTP client did you choose?
3. Why do you think FTP is better than File Manager or Web Disk?
4. How would you explain FTP to a friend who did not know about it?
5. What problems did you have and how did you solve them?
6. What questions would you like us to answer?

Here is the link to feedback your answers to part 1 http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228E3Z3BTU3

Part 2

In this activity I want you to experiment with WordPress themes and find out how to add images and YouTube video to your site together with editing the links in your blog roll.

You will need to dig around inside WordPress to make sure that you understand what is going on. Feel free to add some pages just to use for experimentation. Note that you will be exposed to some of the core ideas behind WordPress as part of this activity (including HTML, CSS). You may choose to explore these ideas yourself or simply follow the examples at this stage.

If things go horribly wrong you can normally just delete the page you are working on and start again.

Here are some resources to help:

As part of this activity you need to add at least 2 new posts to your blog (one containing an image and one with an embedded YouTube video)

Here are the questions to answer at the end of this exercise

1. What did you manage to do?
a. Changed the theme of my blog to one I wanted
b. Added some images to my blog
c. Embedded a YouTube video into my blog
d. Changed the blogroll of links on my blog
2. Please give the URL for your post that contains the image
3. Please give the URL for the post that contains the video
4. What problems did you have and how did you solve them?
5. What questions were raised by this activity that you would like us to answer?

Here is the link to feedback your answers: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB228E3ZWBUCJ

Deadline: Tuesday 28th October, midnight