Chapter 2. Site Manager Tutorial

Site Manager Tutorial

Follow one of the links below to see the Site Manager tutorial that interests you:

Typical Site Manager Tasks

Want to get up, running, and using Site Manager as quickly as possible? Try following the tutorial below in the Site View. (If you want to perform a specific task, try selecting it from the Help menu. To view a list of all the help topics available, choose Help > Index.)

For a description of the different parts of the interface, see the “Site View” help topic.

  1. Select a site. In the Web Site Location text field, enter the WWW site you want to administer (such as http://www.foo.com), or a portion of a WWW site (such as http://www.foo.com/my_directory) and press Enter or click the Load Web Site button. (This site must have the proper Site Manager server software installed. See “Setting Up Your Site Manager Server.”) The resulting view of the site will look similar to a standard desktop directory view.


    Note: If you have a configuration that uses separate servers running on the same system but uses different port numbers, make sure you enter the exact server instance (port number included) into the Web Site Location text field.


  2. Select the Web pages in the site display area on which you want perform certain functions. See “Selecting Files and Directories.”

  3. Preview a file using the built-in browser. A tabbed deck appears at the bottom of the Site View.

    • If the Preview tab is on top of the tabbed deck, double-click a file to preview it.

    • If the Preview tab is not on top of the tabbed deck, select a file, then click the Preview tab. The file appears in the Preview window.

    You can select a different browser by clicking the Preview/Use Browser checkbox in the Preview panel.

  4. Use the action buttons at the bottom of the site display pane or the items in the Selected menu to manipulate files on the site. (Press the right mouse button to see the list available through the Selected menu.)

  5. Edit or check out a file by selecting it and clicking Edit or Check Out (or by choosing them from the menu). You will be prompted for a location to place the file on your local machine; this is known as your work area. In general, it's best to establish one area on your machine for this purpose. You can designate this default area by choosing Options > Preferences. The default location is $HOME/sitemgr_wa.


    Note: By default, Site Manager launches Cosmo Create to edit HTML files.


  6. Check a file in to the site after editing. Select the file by clicking it, and then click the Check In... action button (or choose Selected > Check In in the menu bar). You are prompted for certain information, the file is uploaded to the designated site at the designated location, and the lock is removed.

  7. Create a new file.

    • Select a directory in which you want to create the new file.

    • Choose Selected > New Document > From Existing Local File or Create Copy from Template. See “Checking in New Files” for details.

  8. Publish a file. Drag it from your desktop directory view into one of the directories in the site display area.

  9. Remove a file. Select the file and click the Remove button. You are prompted for verification of the removal from the site.

  10. Validate files on your site. Select the file(s) you wish to validate and click the Validate button. In the Validate panel, you can also drag a file (or set of files) from the view of the site into the Validation drop pocket; this triggers the validation.

  11. View a 3D representation of your site's hyperlink structure. Choose Views > Link View of Site... in the menu bar. You will see a visual representation of the hyperlink structure of your site in 3D hyperbolic space. Note that the Site View and the Link View present your site data in two very different formats and that you can interact with one view and see the results in both views. For example, notice that when you select a document in the Link View, it also becomes selected in the Site View and vice versa.

  12. Perform statistical analysis of the traffic on your site. Web servers keep track of traffic at the site through various log files. You can view the information contained in the log files by clicking the Statistics tab. Click Color in Linkview to see the nodes color-coded according to site traffic, or click Animate in Linkview to see a dynamic hit-by-hit animation. See “Generating and Viewing Statistics About Your Web Site” for more information.

For further getting started information, see “Finding Your Way Around the Site View” and “About the Link View.”

Link View Tutorial

Try any or all of these tasks to familiarize yourself with Link View:

  • Select a node by clicking it. Use the left mouse button to click a node. Notice that the whole structure moves so that the node you selected ends up at the center of the sphere. Your selected node is now large, while the node that was at the center has moved outward and looks smaller. You can also see that the Site View has changed so that the new node is selected and moved to the center of the display pane. Selecting a node in the Site View similarly updates the Link View—the node becomes selected and moves to the center of the Link View.

  • Show different types of links. By default, only the “main” link to each node is drawn. Most Web sites are so interlinked that it would be hard to see anything if all the links were drawn at once. You can show the other incoming or outgoing links for a particular node by choosing Selected > Indirect Links > Outgoing or Incoming > Show. Some nodes might not have any other links besides the main one, while others may be very richly connected. Nodes like a logo image are likely to have large numbers of incoming links, while a table of contents or index document is likely to have many outgoing links.

    You can also hide links by choosing Selected > Indirect Links > Outgoing or Incoming > Hide. Experiment with showing and hiding links to reveal the overall structure of your Web site.

  • Perform other Site Manager functions. The following functions are also available through the Selected menu: preview, revision info, link info, and validate. The results of these actions appear in the Site View.

For details about all the controls available in the Link View, see the “Link View” reference help card.


Note: If you are running Site Manager remotely (in other words, if you logged in to a remote system and launched Site Manager), Link View performance will be extremely slow. Because the Link View requires interactive 3D graphics, it will run much faster when launched from your local system.