From HoverCloud

How To Login

Your New Web Site

This page contains instructions for how to login to your new web site on the Floating Edge (http://floatingedge.com/) web server. Keep in mind the username and password that I gave you in the email concerning your account creation, it is the same for all parts of your web site. If I have installed an image gallery and a wiki for you on your site, the username and password there is the same as well. You have to change them in different places however, so they can become different from each other if you don't update your password in all three places (web site control panel, image gallery, and wiki) at the same time.

Control Panel

You have your own control panel, ssh login, and ftp account, all under the same username and password as your control panel. I'd be happy to do a tutorial or help you out with it if you get stuck, or just experiment (check out the cpanel documentation (http://www.cpanel.net/docs/cpanel/)). I suggest you go in and have a look around and change your password. It'll give you a good idea of what the control panel is capable of. Now is a good time to play, because if you mess things up terribly, I can just blow it all away for you and let you start over.

Here is a link to your control panel, use the username and password that I gave you:

• secure (https://hovercloud.com:2083)
• insecure (http://hovercloud.com/cpanel) (provided because the secure link doesn't work from all locations)

Shell Access

To login to the shell, use an ssh terminal emulator such as PuTTY, with your domain name and the username and password I gave you. I have installed emacs in /usr/local/bin, I suggest the -nw option to use it within a shell window.

FTP

To login with an ftp program to transfer files, use the same domain name, username, and password.

Email

You have one initial pop email box set up at username@your_domain.com, which you can check using the some domain name as the mail server. Or you can set up mail forwarding in your control panel if you don't really want to bother checking that mailbox.

• mailserver: your_domain.com
• username: username
• password: password

When you create other pop email boxes, you must include your domain name in the login when you check the mail, for example, if you create a new email account called "helpers" on your_domain.com, you would check it with a POP3 email client this way:

• mailserver: your_domain.com
• username: helpers+your_domain.com
• password: whatever_you_made_its_password

MediaWiki

More on this soon, until then please read the MediaWiki FAQ (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_FAQ) or Floating Edge Web Site FAQs. For more information on how to edit your wiki pages using the custom extension I've written, you can also check out the help I made for the baoc.org website, which I have given the same imgarray extension: Editing Help at BAOC (http://baoc.org/wiki/Help:Editing#Images). And here is some help on How to Use XEmacs for Wiki Edits. Your wiki pages are very customizable if you know a little html (to use to arrange things a little), or you can just use the pages in plain text mode, sprinkle in a few pictures, and get a reasonably pleasing effect. For ideas of what this wiki software is capable of, check out the Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/), which is the main reason this software was developed.

Gallery

Your image gallery software is powerful. Please read about it on the Gallery Home Page (http://gallery.sourceforge.net) or Floating Edge Web Site FAQs. I should mention that if I have created a 100MB web site for you with a Gallery, that your web site automatically resizes the images to 1 megapixel in size in order to save space (the files end of being about 150k apiece that way instead of several megabytes) and it doesn't keep the originals, so you shouldn't throw away the copies of these pictures you keep at home. The gallery can be changed to keep all pictures in their original size if you like, but you'll need more disk space than 100MB do do that. It's only useful if you wish for people to be able to make nice enlarged prints of your photos right off your web page.

If you would like to add links at your top-level albums page (like a link back to your home page), just ask me to add something like the following to your gallery's albums.php file:

if (!$GALLERY_EMBEDDED_INSIDE) {
   // add a link back to the top of the web site
   $adminCommands .= ' ';
   $adminCommands .= '<a class="admin" title="Return to the ' .
     $gallery->app->galleryTitle .
     ' home page" style="white-space:nowrap;" href="/">[website home]</a>';
 }

The above should be added right before this line in albums.php:

$adminCommands .= "</span>";

Serendipity

Serendipity is blogging software for your web site. It's another set of PHP scripts that's not under Fantastico, but I can install it for you. It comes with a number of skins, which is great, because you can decide the look yourself and don't necessarily have to take a long time to customize the look of it like I did for Phillip's (http://fellupon.com/journal). There's a demo of Serendipity (http://opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=205) that you can experiment with by editing the entries. Your serpendipity blog really has three different modes or sections:

• viewing/weblog mode (it's what all of your visitors see when they look at the blog)
• authoring mode (it's where you go when you first log in, and where you enter or edit your blog entries)
• administration mode (you can go there from the authoring mode in order to change your blog visual style and many other options)

Separate Logins

So these open source software packages for web sites (like Gallery, MediaWiki, and Serendipity) are great, but you end up with a separate password for each one. I'm afraid none of these tools talk to each other. You can get all of this kind of stuff together in a single Content Management System, people do make such things, but I have noticed that none of those seem to do the individual functions as well as the dedicated packages (ie. you get everything all at once but it's all sort of mediocre, and it's still pretty complicated to use anyway.)

One day I'll write a set of web pages that understands how to set a username and password for all these tools at once, since I seem to be sticking with a certain set of tools I like best and creating web site for people by stitching them together. For me, it's just a matter of writing some scripts that set the right fields in the databases and create a user interface for the combined functions, but it takes a lot of time to write these things. I have these grand plans to create a web site package someday that lets you use and customize this set of tools (and others) easily, and then I'll offer it to the world. But that time is not here yet, I'm afraid  :-)