Connecting to a website with Macromedia Contribute (Updated for CS4)

(As of July 2011, this entry has been updated for use with Contribute CS4. If you are still using CS3, see Danielle or I for help with updating.)

This is another in an occasional series of instructional entries.

Most people who edit pages on the WOU website use Macromedia Contribute. (Well, OK, technically it's adobe now, since they bought out Macromedia.) Before you can get started editing, though, you need to connect to your site. Here's how to do that:

Google Docs Basics: uploading and sharing.

This is another in an occasional series of "howto" instructional documents.

To use Google Docs, go to docs.google.com. If you already have a Gmail or Google Docs account, log in with that username and password. Otherwise, create an account by following the instructions in this howto doccument.

The first time you log in, there will be a "Getting Started" box with an arrow pointing to the Upload button. This button is, naturally enough, what you use to upload files. Next to it is the "Create New" menu; we'll get to that in a moment, but first let's talk about uploading.

When you click the Upload button, you'll be taken to a separate page which tells you how much storage you are currently using, and gives you upload options. Let's look at these:

• The Files to upload box shows what files you have currently selected to upload. When you first see open the page, it will say "No files selected"; click the "Select files to upload" link to open a file browser box that lets you choose files from anywhere on your computer or network drives. Navigate to the file you want and click Open to add it to the list of files to upload. You may then click the "Select more files" link if you want to upload more files now.


• Below this box are conversion options. Regardless of whether you want to cooperatively edit files online, or merely store them for others to view or download, you probably want to leave the checkmark in the box labeled "Convert documents, presentations, and spreadsheets to the corresponding Google Docs formats". Word processing documents, spreadsheets, powerpoint presentations, and similar documents will be converted into Google Docs formats. This makes them take less storage space, and allows you to edit them online (and optionally allow others to do so.) Images and other file types like PDF documents are unaffected.


• The other conversion option should probably be left unchecked. However, if you upload an image or PDF document and want Google to attempt to convert it into editable text, check this box. This is a new feature of Google Docs and is not foolproof.


• Below the legal notice about the Terms of Service, you have two important menus and the upload button. Before clicking "Start upload", make sure you understand the settings in the menus.


• The first menu is labeled "Destination folder". If you don't choose anything here, the document will be uploaded into your main folder, but you may also choose to put it into any folder you have created, or any folder that others have shared with you. If you are sharing documents (see below), you will probably have a folder in which you want to upload the document into.


• The second and more important menu lets you choose the document's visibility setting. By default, it says "Private", and this is where you will want to leave it most of the time. It is important to note that private documents can still be shared if you specifically designate people to be able to view or edit them, or if you put them in a shared folder. Your other options are "Public on the Web" which makes the document available to anyone and findable in searches, and "Available to anyone who has the link" which means the document won't be found in searches, but the link to it can be used by anyone to whom you give it (and to anyone those people share it with, and so forth) without requiring a Google Docs account. I strongly recommend leaving documents private unless you have a specific reason the whole world should be able to see them.


• Finally, you have the Start Upload button, which uploads the documents you've selected and converts them according to the options you've chosen. While this is happening, you'll see a progress indicator, and when all files are done you can either click "Upload more files" to, obviously, upload more documents. If you don't want to upload more documents, just click the "Back to Google Docs" link near the top of the page to return to the main page.

You can share individual documents by clicking on them and then using the Share menu on the details page, but if you have many files to share it is easier to create a shared folder and then simply put documents into it. Here's how to do that:

• First, you need to create the folder. Remember that "Create New" menu I mentioned a bit ago? Click it, and choose Folder. This will pop up a window asking you to name the folder; name it something that will make sense to everyone who will be sharing the folder, and click OK.



• The folder will now appear under "My Folders" in the sidebar. Its name should also be showing in the colored header bar to the right of the Upload button; that means you have it open as the current folder. If it is not open (for example, the header bar it might say "All Items" instead) then click on its name in the sidebar.


• Once you have the folder open, find the Share menu just below the header bar. In an empty folder like this one, it will only have one item, with greyed-out text saying "Use the checkboxes to select one or more items, or share this folder". That last part should be a link; click it to bring up the sharing settings window. Note that if you share a document individually, the sharing settings window will be the same, so you can follow the same instructions in that case.



• The Sharing settings window lists the visibility setting of the folder (the settings are the same as when you upload documents) and anyone who can currently access it in any way. Currently, the folder should be set private, and the only name in the list should be your own. Next to your name, the text "Is Owner" designates that you won this folder and have full rights to it.



• Below this list is a text box labeled "Add people:" when you click in it, more options will appear, but before you do that, take note of the text below the box. On a newly created folder, it should say "Editors will be allowed to add people and change the permissions" and there will be a Change link next to it. This is very important: if you leave the settings this way, you need to trust everyone to whom you give editing rights, because they will be able to give rights to additional people or even set the folder to be publicly viewable. If you do trust everybody, you can leave this setting alone, otherwise click the "Change" link and choose the other option. This one says "Only the owner can change the permissions" and explains what this means, I highly recommend choosing this more restrictive option if you plan to share any sensitive data in this folder. Whichever you decide, click the Save button to return to the main Sharing settings window.



• Now, click the Add people box. It will transform into two separate text boxes and some other controls will appear as well. If you have a Gmail account, you can use the "Choose from contacts" link to find people who are already in your Gmail contacts list. Otherwise, you can type the email address of another person who uses Google Docs; however it will only work if you use the exact address they used when creating their account. You can type more than one address if you separate them with commas.



• Next to that, you will see the permissions menu, which by default says "Can Edit". If you don't want these people to edit items in this folder, choose the other option, "Can view". The larger textbox just below lets you type in a message to be sent to these people along with the automatic notification that this folder has been shared with them.



• With the first checkbox below the personal message box, you can choose whether to send a copy of the notification to yourself so you see what it looks like; this isn't really necessary but you can check the box if you wish. The other checkbox is checked by default, and indicates that you want to send the notifications via email; if you uncheck it, the people will only see the notification when they log in to Google Docs. Unless you know they log in regularly, you should leave this box checked.



• Below the Save and cancel buttons, the editor setting is displayed again, and you have another chance to change it as described above. If it is the way you want it, click Save. The names of the people you added should now be visible in the sharing list, along with the permissions they have; you can change the permission setting by clicking on it, or completely remove their sharing rights by clicking the X.


• When you are done adding people, click the close button. They should now be able to see this folder in their list of "Folders shared with me" in their sidebar, and click it to see all the documents in it.

Once you've shared a folder, you can simply upload documents into it, or drag them from the All Documents list onto the folder name in the sidebar. Now here's something that will seem weird if you don;t already use Gmail: documents can be in more than one folder. If you share one folder with a certain group of people, and another folder with a different group, you can share a document with both groups by dragging it to both folders. Whether you're looking at All Documents or the contents of a folder, each document will show the names of the folders it is in; if you want to remove it from a folder, just drag it to the All Documents item in the sidebar (though this only works if you have editing rights on the document.)

Now, you might be thinking "but what about viewing and downloading documents? All this uploading, sharing, and foldering is pretty useless otherwise." Fair enough; luckily this is easy. Whenever you see the name of a document, you can just click it to get to its details page. This will show you a preview if one is available, and give you links to download the document or open it. Note that some documents, such as video files, cannot be previewed or opened in Google Docs, but can be downloaded.

Anyway, this was just the basic introduction. Like most Google services, there's a Help link next to the sign our link in the upper right; explore that for lots more about Google Docs!

Creating a Google Docs account

This is part of an occasional series of instructional posts on various topics.

If you want to use Google Docs but don't already have a Gmail or Google Docs account, you'll need to click the "Create an account now" link below the login box, which will take you to the account creation form. There, you need to enter the following:

1. Your current email address. This does not need to be a gmail address, but must be a real address where you can get a confirmation email. Your wou.edu address is OK to use here. Note that this entire address will be the login name for your Google Docs account.


2. A password. For security reasons, you should NEVER use your WOU password on a non-WOU server. Please create a password that you can remember; it must be at least eight characters long and ideally should include at least one number and punctuation mark. It is OK to write down this password as long as you keep it in a safe place, such as with your credit cards.


3. Re-enter the password to confirm that there weren't any typos the first time.


4. If you are likely to use publicly accessible or shared computers to log in to Google Docs, uncheck the "Stay signed in" checkbox. Otherwise, it is OK to leave it checked so you won't have to log in as often.


5. Uncheck the "Enable Web History" button, unless you are comfortable with Google tracking and remembering searches that you make even when you are not logged in. Click the "Learn More" link for more information about this.


6. Choose your location from the dropdown menu; if you are in the US, the menu will probably already be set to "United States".


7. Enter your birth date. Make sure to use a four-digit year.


8. Type in the verification word. This is necessary to show that you are a person and not some computer program trying to automatically create an account for some sneaky purpose. Unfortunately, their verification words are rather hard to read, because Google is attacked often by hackers and they have to be very sure you are indeed a human. Sometimes the letters are extremely narrow and squashed between two others, but luckily it doesn't matter whether you type them in capitals or lowercase. If you have trouble with the visual verification, turn on your speakers and click the handicapped icon. After a few moments, you will hear three beeps followed by a slowly spoken series of numbers with a computer-generated random muttering in the background. Sometimes you will hear non-number syllables like "oway", "no", or "yow" in the foreground; ignore those and pay attention to the numbers alone. You will hear the words "once again" and the code will be repeated.


9. If you are so inclined, read the Terms of Service. A more readable version may be found at "http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en". Here are some important points:
   
   
   
   • You agree to do nothing illegal, nor attempt to hack or otherwise mess up any of Google's services.
   
   
   • You agree that Google can change the features of their service without notice.
   
   
   • You agree that Google isn't legally responsible for what you do with your account, and that you can't blame Google if you see anything objectionable.
   
   
   • You agree that Google does not guarantee that their service will be available 100% of the time
   
   
   • Google agrees that you retain any intellectual property rights to content you upload.
   
   
   • You agree that Google has a license to display your uploaded content as part of its services, i.e. if you share content with anyone, Google is legally allowed to show it to them. This is the infamous "Section 11.1" which looks very scary when read by someone not versed in legal technicalities; you can find more information at "http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=82366". The key point is that the license granted in Section 11.1 is limited by the Google Docs Privacy policy which states that your information is only shared with people whom you designate. Click here for an independent opinion. Further information can be found by doing a web search for "Google Docs Terms of Service Section 11.1" without the quotes.


10. Assuming you are satisfied with the terms of service, click the button below them that tells Google that you agree and want your account created. You may need to retry once or twice to get the verification text right.

Once you are done with the form, you will get a confirmation email at the address you gave in step one. The subject line will be "Google Email Verification" and it will be sent from "account-verification-noreply@google.com", so make sure your spam filters are set to allow the message through. You should save this message, because you may need it again if you forget your account name or password. Consider saving it as a file in your home directory, so you have a backup in case the email is accidentally deleted.

Click the verification link near the top of the email. You'll be taken to a page that confirms that your account is now active and gives you several options and informational links. It is not necessary to link your account to a gmail address or a mobile phone, but you can do so if you want to. However, instructions for those actions are beyond the purpose of this document.

The "Click here to continue" link will take you to Google Docs itself, which I will cover in another document.

Web updates not showing up?

A few people are reporting that they make web edits on the X: drive, save the file, but the changes never actually show up on the web.

If this is happening to you, the first thing to check is the label on your X: drive in My Computer. It should say "wouwebsite$ on 'Samba 3.3.4 (firefly)' (X:)". If your X: drive says 'sundown' instead of 'firefly', it means that your X: drive was set up manually at some point, and so it couldn't get changed automatically when we changed everybody else's.

Right-click the drive and choose Disconnect, then log out and back in to your computer, and whether you see an X: drive and that it says firefly instead of sundown. If you see that, everything should be fine now, except that if you use the Terminal Server, you need to make sure to check there too.

If you don't see an X: drive after logging back in, let me know. You can reconnect it by going to the Tools menu at the top of the My Computer window and choosing "Map network drive" which should pop up a dialog box. Choose X: from the Drive menu, and type "\\firefly\wouwebsite$" in the Folder box. (Don't type the quotes, and make sure you use backslashes \ rather than normal slashes /.) Make sure the "Reconnect at logon" box is checked, then click Finish and you should be all set.


EDIT: We have now changed things so that you can no longer make changes if your X: drive is connected to the wrong place. If you went into your X: drive and saw only a text file that told you to come here, that's why. If you go through the above process (remember to do it on the terminal server too, if you use it) and it does not fix anything, please let me know!

All recently changed files in the old server (sundown) have been moved to the new server (firefly) as of 1:00 AM on Monday August 30. Again, please let me know if anything is missing or looks wrong.

Apache!

As of a bit after 5:00 PM Friday, our main webserver is running on Apache, rather than Sun's Java Enterprise System Webserver as it has been for years. Originally this change was meant as a test, but by late Friday night (AKA Saturday morning) things looked good enough that we decided to run with it.

Unfortunately, what looks good at 4:00 AM isn't always so great by the light of day. Ever since then I've been running around putting out fires.

Here's a brief list of the problems we've seen (most are already solved.)

• Cold Fusion (.cfm) pages don't work on the new server. All those sites I've found have been redirected back to the old server where they do work.


• Blog admin didn't work. I had to point that back to the old server too, for now.


• Portal single-signon links weren't all working. The link for blog admin is fixed. The WOUAlert link isn't fixed yet, but at least I know the problem and am working on it.


• PHP pages using old-style code block tags didn't work. Some people were coding PHP using the old, deprecated <? ?> tags to delimit blocks of PHP code. The correct way to do this is <?php ?>. I had to tell the new webserver to allow the old-school code, but we really need to get rid of it because it can get mixed up with other languages. BTW, this is what caused the quick links on the homepage not to work, so I'm not totally innocent here myself.


• Old-style PHP database calls didn't work. I replaced the PEAR/DB module so some of this stuff will work again, but there might be other stuff made without PEAR/DB and with obsolete database tags that won't work until it is rewritten.


• Overly tight security settings. Some pages weren't able to get external files that they needed and so were erroring out.

There's more, but I need to get back to that WOUAlert problem.

Prettymail done, on to the next thing...

Prettymail is now in place for both faculty/staff and students. Now I'm hard at work gettinr ready to move our main webserver onto Apache (woo-hoo!). More on that later...

Email scams again

People keep reporting emails that say something like:

Dear network user,
Your account has violated a quota and will be turned off.
To avoid this, email your login name and password to
somebody@somewhere.com.

Signed, wou.edu administrator

To us geek types, this is obviously a scam. I just keep getting reminded that other people don't instantly spot this for what it is, even when it tells them to send their info to a non-WOU address. It can be even harder to spot when the From: address on the email is something like admin@wou.edu, or the message tells you to go to a link that looks like it's on our website but actually goes elsewhere.

So really what we need are some general rules of thumb. The first and most obvious is never, ever, ever, EVER put your password into an email message. Never. And did I mention never? Of course this means we UCS folks should never ask someone for their password except in person -- we really don't even want to get users in the habit of saying their password over the phone.

Another rule of thumb would be never trust emails from generic addresses. When we send messages out, they'll have a specific name on them, not just "admin@wou.edu" or some such.

If we agree on this among ourselves and communicate it to users, hopefully that'll help everybody.

User creation process improvements

A few weeks ago, when Brian was on vacation, some of the rest of us had a communication breakdown about creating new user accounts, and several new employees had to wait entirely too long before they could log on. This was at least partially my fault.

Brian is going to be gone again next week, but this time we won't have these problems because we've improved the process. First of all, we found out why most of the notifications were misrouted and fixed that. Also, I've added some more automation to the faculty/staff account creation system, so there's less work to do. I can't really talk about the details because that would mean giving out too many specifics about our servers, but several steps that formerly had to be done by hand now happen by themselves. The weird part was how easy it was to do, once we took another look at the process; once upon a time it had to be complicated, but thanks to various changes we've made in the last few years, a bunch of stuff was no longer needed.

Anyway it's way the heck late at night and I need to get out of here. At least the prettymail stuff is working , um, pretty well. (Yeah, this is my 2AM sense of humor.)

allfacstaff 2.0 AKA prettymail

Well, I just rolled out the new version. It's been tested against all messages sent during the time we last tried this, and they all worked, but software releases don't tend to survive contact with the users, so we'll see what happens. Let's just hope the bugs are tiny.

Grrr

Yeah, OK, I'm not keeping this up. I need to lower my standards so don't feel obligated to write a full essay for every entry.

Frustration

OK, it's a quarter to two, I've been here since noon (you can criticize my schedule when you start working fourteen-hour days) All week I've been wracking my brains over one single annoying bug in the new prettymail system. Three messages out of 100 come across completely blank, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Their source code looks exactly as it should -- even though these are annoying MS-Word copied emails with hundreds of lines of insane proprietary CSS code, I'm pretty sure of that. I've read pages and pages of documentation, I know all about how to build multilevel MIME-type email messages in five different encodings, I've gone so far as to manually change the source code in every way I can think of, and pipe the message through the mail system over and over and over again.

But they don't show up. Completely blank. No matter what I do. It blows my mind. I've tried everything I can think of.

This kind of thing is just part of being a programmer. Something will stop you cold in your tracks and you have to beat your head on the wall until you find that one letter that's supposed to be capitalized but isn't, or that one variable that got replaced by a local value when you weren't looking, or whatever.

The problem is, I really need to get this done because people are waiting on me. Other projects are waiting on me. I can't afford to take this long on something like this. One thing I do know, though; it's 2 AM now. I'm sure not going to solve it right now. Time to have a weekend and try some more next week.

Freakin' Spammers!

We just had another one of those mass email scams that claimed it came from wou.edu and told people to reply with their usernames and passwords.

At least three people fell for it and their accounts got hijacked and used to send tons of spam until we shut them down. What a mess.

Maybe someday people will learn to think before following instructions they see in some random email. Not likely... but it's more likely than all these [vile cursewording] spammers and scammers deciding to work for a living instead of exploiting people.

Pretty email

You may or may not remember that for a while we converted the all faculty/staff email list to a system of multiple categorized list that people could opt out of. The mechanism basically grabbed email out of the allfacstaff@wou.edu inbox, turned it into plain text, wiped out attachments and replaced them with links to copies of those same files on the website, and put the messages into a database where certain people could approve and categorize them. Another process then searched for approved emails and sent them to the lists belonging to the right categories.

This system turned out not to work well enough, especially the part where it converted everything to plain text. Email messages can have all kinds of cruft in them, including buckets of formatting codes from MS Word, weirdly encoded characters from odd email systems, forwarded messages with attachments, messages forwarded AS attachments, etc. So we had too many messages coming through the system all messed up, and we had to switch back to the old way of doing things.

Since then I've been working on a better system and it's finally coming together. Instead of converting to plain text, I'm converting to the standard multipart/alternative format that contains an HTML body to be used in HTML-capable email systems like the WOU webmail, and also a plaintext body for email programs that can't display HTML (or where people don't like HTML and have turned it off.)

It's a pain because I still need to parse an unknown number of attachments, forwarded messages, etc. The attachments have to be removed and copied to the webserver so we don't have to cram each one through the mailserver a thousand times. I need to replace image links within the email with links to the website copies, and remove various kinds of custom formatting... blah, I'm tired. More later.

Blarg

Wow, I've been sick as a dog for a while. It's nice to be back but there's a ton of things I need to catch up on.

Testing video embedding

I want to see if I can embed a youtube video in a blog post. And not just any video... it shows one of the greatest Rube Goldberg contraptions ever designed. The video has been making the rounds lately so you may have seen it already, but check it out!



Well, it looks like the size isn't exactly compatible with the standard Movable Type layout even if you have a wide screen. Such is life. I'll need to fix that whenever I get around to making a custom template for this blog, though.

Time flies...

And yet again it's been a few months since I last posted. In my defense, these have been crazy months, including the mailserver upgrade, the mess with the all-faculty-staff email lists, frantically trying to get caught up on all the other stuff I had to lets slide because of the big things, then I went on vacation, then I came back and had to get caught up from that, then I was out sick a few days...

Sheesh. The thing is, none of this stuff should be a barrier to updating my blog. I think my problem is that I feel like I have to write something long and involved, not to mention at least a bit witty. Really all that's needed are quick updates.

So let's see if, this time, I can do better. I've been working on those posts about "how does the Web work anyway" that I mentioned, but they're pretty dense, so it might be a while before I put them up. Meanwhile I'll concentrate on shorter posts and try to catch up on my entry count.