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COMS 326 pages
-- Unix intro -- Using MyRU Files
COMS 104 pages

Opening files from your H drive in TextEdit

for COMS 326 Web Production

I recommend doing your Web projects on your lab Macintosh hard disk or a Flash drive, then copying them into the public_html folder on the Web server.

Reasons:

  1. You always have a backup copy of the work.
  2. If your network connection glitches, you won't lose work-in-progress.
  3. You may not always have the luxury of working in a lab where you can mount your server space on the desktop.
  4. It increases your consciousness of "absolute" and "relative" URLs, and how to make them work both when the page is on the Mac and when it's on the server.

However, when necessary you should be able to create, open and edit documents directly on your H drive with TextEdit or Dreamweaver. Unfortunately, some unidentified gremlin is causing problems with opening server (H drive) files with TextEdit.

When I use TextEdit to open a file on a server, here's what I see:

text edit opening screen

The H-drive appears in the left column as "homedir.ra..."; the second column shows my connected name over the "users" folder highlighted in blue; the right column shows the contents of my "rstepno" folder, including the public_html file.

On Thursday, however, some students were getting a different "File Open" display, which showed the whole list of radford.edu e-mail owners in the "Users" folder (middle column), instead of going directly to your personal space. In some cases the program appeared to "hang" while loading the long list of folder names (one for every RU e-mail user!). If you have this problem, show me and we'll try to figure out a way around the problem. For now, the simplest way is to not use TextEdit to open files on the server. Instead, copy to Mac, edit, copy back to server.