Step 4: Sending your HTML and graphics pages to your folder on Pixel

Sending Web Page Files to Pixel

Spinner crept up behind Rayzer. The guy was totally oblivious, clacking away on the keyboard. For a moment, Spinner felt a twinge of guilt. But it was only for a moment. She was about to pounce on Spinner's head, when Rayzer suddenly turned around and said "BOO!".

Spinner jumped back, surprised, straight into several stack of books. Books scattered everywhere. As she picked herself up, a book tottered off a stack and plopped onto her back. She rubbed her back ruefully with her forelegs.

"Got yah," Rayzer crowed in triumph. He picked Spinner up and put her on his lap. She gave him a pained look. Soft hearted as he was, he rubbed her back to help the soreness go away. "Want an M&M?" he asked. With satisfaction, Spinner heard the contriteness in his voice. He was putty in her hands/legs.

So Spinner gorged herself on his M&Ms. Rayzer looked worried when his M&M bowl became a few pounds lighter. "Eh, Spinner, you might want to be a little sparing of what you eat. You don't want to get sick."

"eMphH," Spinner said, between chewing.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Rayzer said reflexively. Seeing that what he said made no difference, he turned back to his keyboard.

After Spinner had eaten her full, she climbed up onto the desk and plopped down contently in front of his monitor. "What ya doing?"

"Oh, you're finished." He slid the mouse across the mouse pad. Spinner had to overcome the urge to jump on the mouse, especially since Rayzer had glued little pink ears on it. "Well I'm FTPing."

"Fighting Terrible Porkers?" Spinner asked. She hated when people used terms she didn't understand.

"Porkers?" Rayzer said, "ehr...oh, I get it." He chuckled, "No FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It's a program that allows me to send a file from my home computer to some other computer on the Internet."

"See here," he pointed to a small icon in his Network folder.

"That's the FTP program you need to connect to another computer. It's set up right now so you can put your files in a computer called Pixel that sits at Virginia Tech's Department of Computer Science." He paused, "Spinner, you do know that to use any program in the Network folder, you have to be connected to CitizensNet, right."

Spinner did not dignify his question but instead burped. She hadn't known that, but why let Rayzer see her ignorance. Rayzer looked at her with a pained expression. "Must you?" he asked. Not receiving an answer, he continued. "After you start the program you'll see this window."

"That's the main window for the FTP program. The left side of the window is for your computer. The right side is for the remote computer you are going to connect to."

Rayzer took a red marker and drew a circle around the word Settings. "If you click on the pull-down menu for Settings, you get the following window which has Connection Profiles. A connection profile is the information for what computer you want to connect to, and how your computer will talk to that computer. For instance, this connection profile is called "Class1". It's set up to talk to "pixel.cs.vt.edu" which, remember, is the computer at Virginia Tech. The port number is sort of like a channel on a TV set. A computer listens to a port for a signal. In this case, and in most cases, port 21 is reserved for FTP."
"Now Pixel has to recognize who you are. It has several accounts set up, and the one set up for the Riner students is called hood, after their teacher. An account is like a special directory on another computer. It allows you to leave files there, and do some special commands. To get into the hood account, you need it's password. This password is different from your e-mail password. So all of this has already been set up for you. This connection profile is for the Riner student web pages. There is also a connection profile for an account for their parent's web pages.
Normally, you don't have to go into Settings unless you have some new connection profile you want to create.

"Once you have connection profiles set up, you can just click on the word Connect at the top of the page." Rayzer used his red marker to circle the word. "This brings up the Connection window. In the Connection window, you select the connection profile you want, and then click OK." Rayzer circled the connection profile class1 with a green marker. "If you have those connection profiles already set up, you don't really have to enter any other information for host, or password, or anything else. "
That's it, wait a few seconds for your computer to connect to Pixel. Now remember, you have to be connected to CitizensNet for this to work. The files you send to Pixel has to go through your phone line, to CitizensNet, and from there over the Internet to Virginia Tech.

"On the top left pane of the window (get it, pane of glass in a window), you have the current working directory on your computer. On the top right pane, you have the directory you are looking at on Pixel. Your working folder is called Work on your C drive, also called the hard drive." Rayzer drew a red circle where the local folder was specified. "The remote folder is called hood." He also drew a green circle where the remote folder was specified. See that on the remote folder, there are several folders. You need to find your own folder and send all your folders to only your folder. Otherwise, you can overwrite or damage someone else's files. To go into a folder, you need to click on the yellow folder. Once you are in a folder, to get out of it, you click on that bent arrow." Rayzer drew brown circles around the bent arrows.
"At the bottom left, you have the files that are in your current folder on your computer. Remember the current folder is called Work. At the bottom right, the files that are in the remote folder (on Pixel) are listed. To transfer a file from your local computer to a remote computer, you just grab the file with the mouse. and drag it to the lower right region where the files on the remote computer are listed. You can also copy entire folders by grabbing a folder and dragging it to the right screen. If you want to copy a file from the remote computer Pixel to your computer, you go the opposite direction. Grab from the Right side and drag and release in the lower left window."

"It's that simple," Rayzer said. "Of course there are more things you can do, like create folders on the remote machine or your own machine. See those little buttons like arrows on each side of the words like Change, Create, Remove, Copy. The buttons point to the computer you want to do that command on. If you click on the left arrow, the command executes on your computer. If you click on the right arrow button, then it happens on the other computer."

"Remember when you finish transferring files, you click on teh word Disconnect at the top of the FTP window. Oh, and it's a good idea to disconnect from the Internet when you are finished."

Spinner nodded, although she was thinking about other things. That was quite an embarrassment, being startled by Rayzer. Now what could she do as a prank in return? Then she noticed Rayzer scrubbing at his screen with a paper towel. He seemed perturbed. "Rats," he said, "I used a permanent magic marker." Spinnder couldn't help but laugh. With Rayzer, sometimes, no prank was needed.