Steps
by
Stepno

 How to manage files with myru.radford.edu

Instructions for copying documents to your Home drive,
or to your Web page space on www.radford.edu

You may already use your Radford H drive to avoid computer disasters by keeping a backup copy of your work. Everyone who has an @radford e-mail address gets storage space on a file server that we call your "H" or "Home" drive. (Or think H for Highlander.)

In Web production classes, you will use part of that H drive space for your personal Web site.

When you are using a computer on the Radford network, finding the H drive is as simple as using the computer's internal disk (C drive), a USB drive or a Flash memory stick. But what if you are off-campus, even off studying in London?

One solution is to copy files to the H drive with a secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program, such as FileZilla, Fugu or Fetch, or an FTP system within Web applications like Dreamweaver. Those are great if you have a lot of documents to save at once.

However, the MyRU portal has a built-in FTP page that is handy for making simple website uploads. The portal also gives you an easy way to make new Web pages public, as described below, instead of the trickier Unix "change mode" (chmod) approach.

For a video version of these instructions, you can stream an mp4 demonstration here, or scroll down for the embedded Quicktime/iTunes version.

Home drive to the rescue

Here's the MyRU way to copy documents, pictures and other computer files to your "H drive" or "Home drive" space:
  1. Go to http://myru.radford.edu
  2. Login with the same name and password you use for Radford e-mail (don't include "@radford.edu")
  3. Click the "File" tab on the right.
  4. To copy something from your computer to your H drive, navigate through the Local System list to open the folder you want to copy from.  (The folder icon with two dots after it allows you to move "up" to the folder containing the visible folders.)
  5. Navigate through the Remote System list to open the folder you want to copy into. Click on that folder to open it. (Remember, only public Web pages should go in the folder named public_html. Keep private information out of that folder.)
  6. In the Local System list, click the name of the document or folder you want to copy  into the Remote System. (You can use shift-click to select more than one file to copy.)
  7. Click the left-to-right ( > > ) button or arrow.
  8. Wait until you see the new item appear in the Remote System list. (If you have a lot of files, you may have to scroll the alphabetical list to find it.)
  9. IF you get an "Unable to upload one or more files" error message, don't panic! It probably just means the portal has logged you out after the program's "idle" time limit. Just go back to myru.radford.edu and login again, then repeat the steps above.
  10. When you're done, log out of the portal, especially if you are on a public-access computer in a lab. Otherwise someone else might access your files. (But if you're building a Web site, you're not done yet. Read on.)

World Wide Web Publishing: Setting "worldwide" viewer permissions

  1. To publish something as a Web page, put it in your "public_html" folder using any of the methods mentioned above.
    • Your "home page" (such as http://www.radford.edu/rstepno) is always a document named "index.html" in the "public_html" folder.
    • The index.html file is what someone sees when they go to http://www.radford.edu/yourname (with "yourname" replaced by your e-mail name).
    • Within your Web site, you can have many folders, each with its own index.html document.
  2. After you put an html document, picture, or other file in a public folder, you have one more thing to do to really make it public. This step is needed whether you put the material there with MyRU or by directly copying to the H drive.
  3. From any MyRU portal page, click on the "My Accounts" tab to the left of "My Files"
  4. In the "Quick Links" section on the right, click "Update Web Permissions," then click the button that says "Click here to set file permissions."
  5. When you're done, log out of the portal, especially if you are on a public-access computer in a lab. Otherwise someone else might access your files.

Video demonstration (Quicktime)

-- Just click to pause or restart the player. --


Footnote: Yes, this is a rather ugly Web page. We may improve it as a class exercise.

... last update July 11, 2009