WK9 Tutorial – Webspace – Introduction to Digital Design

Site Setup – Think global, act local

I’d suggest creating a folder called ‘html_local’ in your Documents folder, accessible through your Home Folder, and you should develop directory structure and files in there.

Inside this folder you should create a subdirectory for each website you work on (e.g. ‘digital_design’). This will be the ‘local’ ‘root’ folder for your website files.

It’s good practice to keep different types of files separate, so inside your root directory create three more subdirectories, called ‘images’, ‘css’, and ‘scripts’.

Finally, your webspace will need a homepage, so you should create an HTML page using a suitable editor (e.g. Dreamweaver), and call it ‘index.html’, placed directly inside your ‘root’ directory.

You’ll need to copy any folder and files you make or amend to your ‘remote’ folder on the playground webspace.

Where can I find my student webspace?

You can access your playground webspace using the Finder’s Go > Connect to Server function.

You should connect using: smb://playground.eca.ed.ac.uk/playground_people/sXXXXXXX/html

You’ll need to enter your username and password as if you were logging on to one of the lab machines.

The folder called ‘html’ is your world readable webspace, so anything you want people to see must be placed in there. We can copy across individual files or folders.

More information on connecting to your webspace on your own computers can be found on the Computing WIKI (NB you’ll need to use the details above (but without the smb:// bit) NOT what’s in the examples on this page).

Connecting on your own Mac is pretty simple as long as you’re connected to the University’s VPN. After that you can follow the instructions above. On a PC you might need to check that you are connecting as ED\sXXXXXXX (i.e. the ‘Domain’ needs to be set)

The world readable URL for your files would be:
playground.eca.ed.ac.uk/~sxxxxxxx/digital_design/ (assuming index.html as the homepage, and digital_design as the folder) or playground.eca.ed.ac.uk/~sxxxxxxx/digital_Design/theFileName.html

Some basic notes and viewtorials introducing HTML and CSS can be found at:

The password for viewing the videos is atrium

You can also find more useful information on HTML and CSS at www.w3schools.com