[Techtalk] Collaborating on websites without ssh

[Billie Walsh]

On 08/31/2014 11:08 PM, Akkana Peck wrote:
> I'm helping a local nonprofit with its website. There are three of
> us working on it right now, and things are going great, except for
> one thing: the cheap web host we have for this site doesn't offer
> ssh, just ftp.
>
> I'm totally spoiled, having always had ssh and rsync (or better yet,
> a version control system). I don't need ssh to log in to a live
> shell; I just want to be able to rsync files between the live server
> and my local machine, to make sure I've downloaded everybody else's
> changes before I start changing things myself. My attempts so far at
> elaborate lftp scripts to mirror the website don't seem to work very
> well -- they take forever, lose chmod information, re-download
> unchanged files yet sometimes miss changed ones. And ftp-ing files
> back up to the server is a pain because of needing to keep track of
> which directory I'm in on each end (lcd ../data; cd ../data;
> mput ...; lcd ../resources; cd ../resources; mput ...  and so on).
>
> This must be a common problem. Does anyone have any advice for
> keeping in sync with other people's changes and uploading lots of
> files when neither ssh/rsync nor version control is an option?
> Are there rsync-like tools that cheap webhosts offer even if they
> don't offer ssh? Or rsync-like wrappers on top of ftp?
>
>          ...Akkana

I manage well over a hundred genealogy/history websites [ thank goodness 
they don't need daily changes and most don't change much at all ]. I 
have to admit that I'm the only one working on them though. I use GFTP. 
It's simple to use and works very well. The few times I have 
collaborated with someone else it took close communication with the 
other person to be sure we both knew what the other was doing. We 
managed it with FTP with no problems.


-- 

Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must. like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it.-Thomas Paine

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