Using KompoZer At Home

There are two ways of using KompoZer at home.

If you wish, you can run programs (such as KompoZer) remotely on erdos from your home computer. You should read the instructions for doing this on a Windows machine or a Macintosh, as needed. Note that if you choose this method, you might find KompoZer to be a bit sluggish, since almost everything you do will involve the network connection.

The rest of this note assumes that you will be running KompoZer directly on your home computer. (Of course, you must install KompoZer first!) Note that your at-home work can be

• instead of using the machines in Room 812, or
• in addition to using the machines in Room 812.

If the latter, then you'll probably want to save the current working version of your website on a flash drive when you are done working in Room 812.

The only change in your workflow is that the local version of your website must actually be "published" (i.e., transferred to the web server) for it to become visible to the world. As mentioned earlier, the problem is that erdos only allows SFTP (the Secure File Transfer Protocol) whereas KompoZer doesn't provide SFTP. This means that you'll need to use a separate program (one that does has SFTP) when you want to publish your website.

The good news is that such programs abound, and that they're free.

• If you're using Windows, you might want to install either FileZilla, PuTTY or WinSCP. Note that PuTTY provides "terminal emulation", in addition to SFTP.
• If you're using a Macintosh, you can use a number of SFTP clients, including FileZilla, Fetch, Cyberduck, or Fugu, among others.

Please note that you must set up your SFTP client to actually use secure FTP. Instructions for doing so will vary, depending on which program you use. For example, if you're using FileZilla on a Mac, use the Site Manager (command-S, or look in the File menu) to set the Server Type to be SFTP-SSH File Transfer Protocol:

Once you've installed your SFTP client, the main thing to keep in mind is that you need to use the SFTP client to publish your website, rather than KompoZer. Different SFTP programs will have different interfaces, but the main idea as folows:

• Use a designated (new) folder on your home machine for building the website. Everything for said website must go into that folder.
• When you want to publish the website, use your SFTP program to transfer that folder to your public_html directory on erdos. You'll need to make a network connection to erdos using your user name and password, and specify that you want to transfer the files to your public_html subdirectory (rather than, say, your home directory) on erdos. You'll also need to tell the SFTP program which files need to be transferred over to erdos; this may be as simple as doing a drag-and-drop of your local working folder onto one panel of the SFTP program.

If you have any problems then please speak to your instructor.