Access to the course web sites for editing has been restored and as a reminder we would like to offer the following methodology for maintaining your course pages:

If adhered too, this method will provide you with everything you need to effectively manage your courses and enable you to instantly recover from any errors that might happen along the way. You should follow these steps each time you begin new edits on your course pages. But before your first edits take place create a directory structure in your Home Directory (or Documents folder) to resemble this:

With that structure in place copy the files you are going to be editing to both the 'stable' and 'test' folders.

If for some reason your edits do not look or function correctly, upload the files in your 'stable' directory to "reset" the live site and then go back to your local 'test' directory and make corrections as needed.

No matter how skilled you are or believe your assistants to be - it is never good practice to work with Live files directly on the web server. You should be aware and understand that doing so makes it very hard for APPM-IT to be able to restore your original files in a timely fashion.

It is almost always reassuringly a good practise for you to have current local copies of your files, prior to any editing, to restore from should the unthinkable happen.

HOWTO: Copy files from the web server to your local machine.

Please follow these steps to create a local copy of your files prior to editing:

Create a folder in your Documents folder called 'web'
In the 'web' folder create another folder called 'stable' and a folder called 'test'
Once these folders are created locally open a Terminal window

At this point you may want to login to the gateway with your User Name and Password to view the current file structure so that you can understand the path you need to perform the copy to your local machine. For the Fall 2011 Courses the path on the server will be your home folder (i.e the default folder you see upon login)

Issue the following command to copy the files you wish to edit to your local machine. Before issuing this command you should be logged out of the Gateway and have a local prompt to work from

Linux Users

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /home/<"name">/web/stable

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /home/<"name">/web/test

Mac Users:

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /Users/<"name">/Documents/web/stable

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /Users/<"name">/Documents/web/test

Windows Users:

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /%USERPROFILE%/Documents/web/stable

scp appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">/<"filename">    /%USERPROFILE%/Documents/web/test

HOWTO: Copy files to the web server from your local machine.

Issue the following commands from a Terminal window to copy your edited files back to the web server
Linux Users

scp /home/<"name">/web/test appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">

Mac Users

scp /Users/<"name">/Documents/web/test    appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">

Windows Users:

scp /%USERPROFILE%/Documents/web/test    appm####@appm-gw.colorado.edu:~/<"dir">

NOTE:

Windows users will need a Terminal program to execute the scp command
Where #### is your course number
Where <"dir"> is the directory on the web server you wish to access
Where <"filename"> is the name of the file you wish to copy from the web server
Where <"name"> is the User Name of the person currently logged on
To copy entire directories the use "-r" option of scp.
To preserve permissions of files when copying to and from servers user the "-p" option of scp
Other standard SCP options applu, To learn more about SCP (and SSH), here is a simple tutorial

SUGGESTED METHOD FOR MAINTAINING YOUR COURSE WEB SITE

HOWTO: Copy files from the web server to your local machine.

HOWTO: Copy files to the web server from your local machine.