Section 20.3. Maintaining Your Site

20.3. Maintaining Your Site

A live site is a living site. It isn't a static thing like a cinder block. It grows and evolves. As you add new content and new pages, you want to keep the published version of your site up to date. This section shows you some easy methods for doing just that.

BEHIND THE SCENES

An old scrap of web wisdom says that you should update your site as often as you want the visitors to come back. So if you want your visitors to come back once a week, you should make updates once a week. If you want your visitors to come back every day, you need daily updates. If you want them to come back every hour, you need to give them a reason, every hour on the hour. By the same logic, a web site that sits untouched for months on end probably has a similarly unenthusiastic audience base.

TECHTALK

Your local and remote web sites are synchronized or in synch when they have the same content and the same structure. When they don't, they're out of synch.

20.3.1. Synchronizing Your Site

You now have two versions of your site: the local version, which is the one on your personal computer; and the remote version, which is the live, published version, the one that your visitors see when they go to your URL. Right now, the two versions are exactly the samethey're synchronized, or in synch. However, as you make changes to your local filesadding new content, removing old content, moving the files to different folderstheir remote counterparts don't automatically update themselves. Your updated local version no longer matches the version that you originally published, so your sites are out of synch.

This situation is very easy to remedy. In the Files panel, connect to your site and switch to Local view so that you see the files and folders on your personal computer. Then select the local root folder, right-click, and choose Synchronize from the context menu. The Synchronize Files dialog box appears, as Figure 20-12 shows.

Figure 20-12. Publish your latest changes to the remote site

From the Synchronize menu, choose the option for your entire site, and choose Put Newer Files To Remote from the Direction menu. If you've deleted or renamed files in the local site, check the Delete Remote Files Not On Local Drive option. Click Preview to review the changes.

The Background File Activity dialog box opens as Dreamweaver compares the two versions of your site. Upon completion, you get the Synchronize dialog box, as Figure 20-13 shows.

Figure 20-13. Reviewing the update in the Synchronize dialog box

Review the changes that Dreamweaver plans to make. If you don't want to make a specific change at this time, select it in the list and click the Ignore button.

When you're ready to go, click OK, and Dreamweaver performs the requested operations. Your published site is now up to date.

BEHIND THE SCENES

You may notice a mix of backward slashes and forward slashes in the File column of the Synchronize dialog box. This can be confusing, but it isn't a cause for concern. Whether a path appears with forward or backward slashes depends upon the preference of the operating system. Windows prefers the backward slash, while Unixthe operating system, in one form or another, for most of the Webprefers the forward slash. Both mean the same thing in this context, in that they separate the folders or directories of a file's path.

If you want a quick (but not always accurate) rule of thumb, you can say that a path with backward slashes points to a local file on a PC, while a path with forward slashes points to a remote file on a web server somewhere, but don't rely too heavily on this distinction. The real root of the issue is OS syntax, and unless you're in charge of a complex network, you don't need to worry about which way the slashes are tilting.

TECHTALK

Getting files means downloading them from your web host's computer to your computer.

20.3.2. Getting Remote Files

Occasionally, you may want to retrieve the remote version of a file. Maybe you made some substantial changes to the local version of the file that you've since thought better of, or maybe someone from the marketing department logged onto your computer and, being attracted to all those bright, shiny Dreamweaver buttons, ended up deleting a local page or two. You can just as easily get files, or download them from the remote site to your local site.

To get remote files, connect to your web host and switch the Files panel to Remote view. Select the files or folders that you want to retrieve, and click the Get button in Figure 20-14 to retrieve the remote versions of your files or folders.

Figure 20-14. The Get button in the Files panel

If the file or folder that you selected appears in some version on your local site, Dreamweaver tells you about it, as Figure 20-15 shows. Click Yes to proceed, or click Yes To All if you're getting more than one file and you know that you want to overwrite them all.

Figure 20-15. Dreamweaver asks if you want to overwrite your local version of the file

TIP

Getting a remote file doesn't delete the file from the remote computer. It simply makes a copy of that file on your local machine (or overwrites the existing local file of the same name).

To delete a remote file, select the file in Remote view of the Files panel, right-click, and choose Edit Delete from the context menu.