My eldest son (10) wants to try his hand at creating a web site. I’d seen Nvu recommended on the forum a few times so grabbed a copy to try. It’s probably pretty good, but after creating a simple Hello World page I hit a major problem. The Nvu publisher can only upload using browser based FTP. My server doesn’t have FTP enabled in the web server, so this kills off Nvu because it’s not a simple make page, click button to upload system.
So can anyone recommend any other web editors to try? It must…
be free
be relatively simple to use, e.g. WYSIWYG and a couple of button clicks to upload
have a real FTP (and/or SFTP/SCP) upload capability
I did think about doing that, but a lot of FTP clients are a bit daunting with all the buttons, two (or more) panes and all the files on display. Also I don’t want him to end up with a view of the web server where he can start deleting stuff I’ve put there for him!
CoreFTP says it does a one-click transfer, but I assume that’s once you’re logged in in the right place. It would really need a fully scripted FTP client where you could just click an icon on the desktop to launch it and do the transfer. The other problem is that without an integrated FTP function he’d be liable to make changes on the screen, hit transfer than then wonder why the web site didn’t change (probably forgot to save the changes before transferring!)
Could you set up a batch that logs in and just uploads his whole working directory? With your connection speed that shouldn’t be a big deal. Or set up a sync process that just uploads changed files?
One other easy idea would be to set him up with a Google account and use their Page Creater builder and have his site there for now, until he is more comfortable with the whole deal? They provide an address like http://username.googlepages.com/
If you want to check it out and need an account holler (you know the address) and I will send along an invite…
Googlepages…tiz an option, but as he’s already got his own subdomain with a few MS Word created pages on that he and a couple of friends (allegedly) look at I don’t think he’d want to change his address. I guess I could put a re-direction wrapper on his sub-domain, but I like the idea of him using space on my server so I can keep track of what he’s doing!
There is already a limited FTP account for his webspace.
WinSCP might be like drag’n’drop, but it’s still adding complexity. He’s at an age where he doesn’t yet understand the concept of multiple files and directories.
Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
It’s basic FTP via the web server rather than via a real FTP server. If you look in the Nvu forum there are a lot of people asking for real FTP/SCP/SFTP, but the developers don’t seem to accept that it’s needed. I would have thought that there would be dozens of bit of example source code to allow it to be added, but they’ve been asked for over 9 months to add it and still no version that includes it.
what about setting up wd, then he could use the manual ftp upload, in the ftp/internet setup
where you select a file to upload, and click on upload now…
(if the correct remote directory is already set up, and correct ftp settings)?
maybe i could write a simple to use ftp program?
(and sell for a little bit of money?)
I may be mis-understanding something here. but I just downloaded the program, setup a “new site” and used the normal ftp server on the webserver to publish to.
I had not even activated the virtual host on the webside yet, so it didn’t use that.
Note that the ftp://oden.tnet.com is the hostname where the virtual hosts are located and all that was running at the time I published was the normal ftp server (Proftpd). The user account, maillist is a virtual account who’s root directory is in the web virtual host tree for that site.
I didnt make much of a page, since I’m not familar with the program (yet) but I had no problem sending over an index.html file using the Publish button.
Note that the account was setup a week or so ago to test a new mailing list program that I’ve not gotten around to playing with yet, so the virtual host and account was already setup on my test server and ready to try with Nvu…
As to the program itself Nvu… got to play with it a bit …
I’m running Proftpd so I’ll have to try this again. I tried connecting like you did and got errors. I looked at the connection log info in Nvu and it seemed to be doing HTTP protocol GET comments to FTP rather than the more normal FTP commands.I then went looking at the support forum where there seemed to be many other users complaining about the same problem.
I don’t know if you are still looking, but this one, although not WYSISYG is easy to use, is free, has FTP, but also has the ability to preview without uploading to the web. It can be configured to preview in all (from memory) browsers.
The urgency went away (you know what kids are like flitting from one idea to the next). However, they would need a WYSIWYG editor. Raw HTML is too advanced for them at the moment.
