Workstation Setup Resources—Room 202, Ford Hall, Willamette University

Much work for this course will involve creating and storing Web pages, style sheets, and other files. In practice, this activity will likely involve at least three different computers:

• A computer (e.g., in Room 202 of Ford Hall, or your own laptop) for creating and editing materials.

• A university storage server for the long-term storage of your materials.

• A university Web server, established for this course, that will allow display of your files in Web browsers and will also run behind-the-scenes work to support PHP programming and a MySQL database.

This Web page describes setup procedures for your use of each of these environments. Instructions are organized into three main parts:

• Setting up a local machine as a work environment

  • Adjusting your Finder preferences
  • Adjusting your TextEdit preferences

• Accessing shared drives

  • Connecting to Willamette's storage server
  • Connecting to a course Web server

Setting up your Local Computer (e.g., in Ford 202)

Adjusting Your Finder Preferences

Work through this course will require that you have substantial access to directories and files on the Mac Desktop. The following steps are strongly encouraged:

1. Click on the "Finder" icon (the square, smiling face on the Dock, likely at the bottom-left of your screen).

   1. At the top of the screen, click under "Finder" and "Preferences"; a "Finder Preferences" window should appear.
   2. Click on the "Sidebar" icon, and click on the box that shows your username.
   3. Click on the "Advanced" icon, and click on the box that indicates "Show all filename extensions"

2. Move the mouse to the listing of directories and files for your account.

   1. Check that your home directory is displayed under the listing of "Favorites"
   2. Click on your home directory, so that "Finder" appears on the top of your screen, and then click on the "New Folder" option. When a new folder template appears in the Finder window, specify a name for the new directory (e.g., "CS199").

Adjusting Your TextEdit Preferences

In this course, we will want to edit text directly—without the editor adding material to what you type, and without the translation of simple characters to something that might look more elegant (but not function properly). Although TextEdit can work well, its settings require adjustment to meet the purposes of this course. Overall work involves two main steps:

1. A TextEdit Window Icon already may appear in the Dock at the bottom of the screen. If not:

   1. Click the "Finder" icon, and on "Applications" in the window that appears.
   2. Scroll down to locate "TextEdit.app"
   3. Move the mouse to "TextEdit.app", hold the left mouse button down, and move the mouse to the Dock (possibly next to the Finder icon).
   4. An icon for "TextEdit" should appear on the Dock.

2. Adjusting settings with TextEdit

   1. Open TextEdit (click on the icon you added to the Dock).
   2. In the TextEdit menu at the top of the screen, click "Preferences".
   3. In the "New Document" tab,
      • Under format, select "Plain text"
      • Under Options, deselect all boxes (that is, no check marks should be indicated).
   4. Under the "Open and Save" tab,
      • Check "Display HTML files as HTML code instead of formatted text".
      • Uncheck "Add ".txt" extension to plain text files".

Accessing Shared Drives

Although we will develop materials on a Mac Workstation in Ford 202 (or on our own laptop or desktop computes), we will want to save these materials over the full semester, and we will want to display selected materials on the World Wide Web. These interests require that we copy our local materials to a storage server and to a Web server, run by Willamette University. Fortunately, access to both servers is similar:

On a Mac

1. Click on the "Finder". When the word "Finder" appears at the top of the screen,

   1. Click on "Go"
   2. Under "Server address" type:

      smb://netfiles.willamette.edu/yourusername
      

      where you type your Willamette login name in place of yourusername.

   3. Click "Connect". If all goes well, a new Finder window will appear, and you will have accessed a directory where you can store files.
   4. Once "Connect" goes well, click the Plus sign "+", so the Server address becomes visible in the window marked, "Favorite Servers".

2. Follow the same steps with the address, smb://cs-199.willamette.edu/www

On a Windows machine

The process on Windows is quite similar to that for a Mac, except that the relevant addresses use back slashes:

\\cs-199.willamette.edu\www

Using these Shared Drives

With these drives available, typically work for this course will involve these steps:

• [optional] Copy an earlier version of a file from your storage server directory (smb://netfiles.willamette.edu/yourusername) to your local working directory (e.g., CS199).

• Use TextEdit to [create or] edit your file on the local machine.

• When a Web page or other file is ready for testing on the Web, copy the file to the Web server (cs-199.willamette.edu/www).

• Iteratively, check the Web server to determine how the materials are working.

  1. Edit the file locally as needed
  2. Copy the updated file to the Web server

• When development work is done for this session, copy the current version of the local file to your storage server account. (Placing your current version in storage will allow you to do further editing from any machine on the Willamette campus.)