Development: Mac OS X Alternative Website Editing Connection

When/Why to Use the Alternative Way to Connect

Some recent versions of Mac OS X, notably 10.5 (Leopard) and some recent versions of 10.4 (Tiger) have a bug in the application typically used to connect to your website for editing; however, the underlying technology still works so you can manually connect using an alternative method.

How to Use the Alternative Way to Connect

Reference the screen shot below to help guide you.

1. Use Finder to locate the terminal.app which is in Application | Utilities
2. Open terminal.app
3. Type the connection command in terminal.app window, as described below, all in one line:

mount_smbfs //yourbsdid@webfiles.bsd.uchicago.edu/yourwebsite /Users/yourmacid/yourfolder

Here's an explanation of the command:

mount_smbfs

the Mac OS command to mount the website--type this exactly as you see here

//yourbsdid@webfiles.bsd.uchicago.edu/yourwebsite

the address to your website folder on the BSD server--change the yourbsdid and yourwebsite text to your BSD userid and your BSD website name, respectively

/Users/yourmacid/yourfolder

the local folder on your desktop where the website will be mounted, i.e. where you will access the files to edit--change the yourfolder text to whatever you want, or use a completely different path, as long as you know where to find it

Once connected, please refer to the Editor's Guide for addition help with editing your site.