Using Your ASCJCapstone FTP Site

Introduction

This tutorial is for students who have received a fully-hosted FTP site for their course. If you received a WordPress site, please visit our ASCJCapstone WordPress tutorial.

The FTP site you received is hosted on USC Annenberg’s subdomain, ASCJCapstone.com. Students’  final projects will be created on these websites. While a template is pre-loaded onto the server to provide a baseline for all ASCJCapstone FTP sites, some experience hand coding HTML and CSS will be necessary to customize and add content to your site. The code files you’ll be editing are well commented and should help you navigate to relevant sections on your own.

Since your site is managed and owned by USC Annenberg, no additional security is necessary and the server is backed up weekly. Please ensure that your images and videos are compressed to an appropriate size before uploading them to the site.

This tutorial will guide you through accessing and setting up your website.

Accessing Your Site (For the First Time)

You will receive an email after registering for your site with your credentials.

If you did not receive an email, please contact us at asctech@usc.edu.

You will need an FTP client to connect to your site. In this tutorial we’ll use Cyberduck, a free FTP client available for both Windows and Mac

Download Cyberduck here

Add a Connection Point

After launching Cyberduck, click on the Open Connection + sign (circled in red) in the top-middle of the window.

Log in to the Server

To log in to the server:

1. Make sure the dropdown menu at the top shows you’re using FTP (File Transfer Protocol).
2. Enter ftp.ascjcapstone.com in the Server field.
3. Enter your username from your account email in the Username field.
4. Enter your password from your account email in the Password field.
5. Click Connect.

Note: If you get a dialog box that says “Unsecured FTP Connection” and asks you to switch to FTP-SSL, click Continue.

Editing Your Site Template

Once you establish an FTP connection, you’ll see several files already in your folder. This is your site’s template, providing the framework for the content of your final project. With the template, you won’t need to code every element of your site and can focus on customizing it’s design and content.

To begin editing your site, you should download these template files and edit a version on your computer. Once you’ve tested your changes, you can re-upload the files via your FTP client so that your live site is up to date.

To download your site files and begin editing, select all the template files and click Action > Download To.

Note: You’ll also need to download a free text editor like Visual Studio Code or Sublime.

Previewing Your Site Changes

While editing the site files, you may want to preview your changes and test whether or not your additions were made successfully. To do this, you can navigate to the index.html file in your site template files and open it in your web browser.

Your browser will display a locally hosted version of your site, loading data from the local site files and folders you downloaded instead of from your ASCJCapstone FTP site.

You can use this to preview your site changes before uploading them via FTP to your ASCJCastone FTP site.

Upload Files to Your Live FTP Site

To upload your code files to the server, you can simply drag the files from your Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows) and drop them on Cyberduck’s file browser.

If you’re uploading files with the same name as any existing files on the server, you’ll be prompted if you want to replace the files.