Taylor County Public Library Tech

How to FTP with FileZilla

eli — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 20:07:44 +0000

So, let’s say that you have a website that you maintain and update. You’ll need a way to transfer files to your web server, which is sitting at the location of your web hosting service company. Your web hosting company may offer a way to do this over the internet, through their site. This will usually work just fine, and it’ll get the job done. However, having a program on your computer to do this can make a world of difference. What you need is a FTP program. A File Transfer Protocol program can send files directly from your computer, to your web server. You can select which directory your files go into, rename them, move them around, whatever you like. You can manage the files on your web server almost as easily as you can manage them on your own computer.

Well, we have a website that we have hosted remotely, and we use FileZilla to transfer files to it. This program was a quick download, and in just a few steps you can have it configured. You’ll only need 3 pieces of information.

Address of your server (Example: yourservername.websitehostname.com)
Username to log in to your server
Your password

Here’s how to set this up…

Download FileZilla here.
Install FileZilla — Double-click on the downloaded installation file, & follow the installation instructions. The default settings will work just fine.
Open FileZilla, enter your server address, username, & password, and hit Enter. Note the red box in the photo below

Now you’ll have a 2-window view with your computer’s files on the left, and your webserver on the right. All you have to do is navigate to the file you want to transfer, and just drag it with the mouse over to the directory on the right, on your webserver, where it needs to go. That’s it! It’s much quicker & easier than using the web interface of some FTP apps.

Google Earth helping cure society’s ills

eli — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:01:26 +0000

Google Earth can do so much good for mankind. Even helping to stem the tide of drug abuse. Swiss police were aided by a google earth satellite image in nabbing some pot growers. Read all about it here.

Our new website!

eli — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:45:15 +0000

Our current website is part of our county’s site, and you can see it here. It’s maintained by our county IS dept., and that can make getting new information onto the site tough. That dept. has a lot of responsibilities, and it can take time to get things done for us, understandably so.

We came up with the idea of having a site that we could maintain and host remotely. We figured that this would save everyone time, and some money too. We can get our updates made to our website quicker, and the ever so busy IS dept. doesn’t have to worry about maintaining our website, which requires some bit of regular attention. How are we going to accomplish this? With wordpress of course.We’re going to use wordpress as content management software, and have it hosted by DreamHost.

A link to our new site will follow shortly, here’s a sneak peak…

Should you upgrade with each new version of Ubuntu??

eli — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:45:09 +0000

Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu every 6 months like clockwork. Each version is supported for 18 months, except for the Long Term Support version. These releases are supported for 3 years. Every 2 years, an LTS version is released instead of a standard release. This raises a question.

Should I upgrade every 6 months, or just wait for the LTS to come along every 2 years and upgrade to it?

We have chosen to stay on the LTS upgrade path. It would be a hassle to upgrade every 6 months. These aren’t major changes we’re talking about here, but there are changes that can affect things. It’s simpler to just avoid all that and stick with an Ubuntu release that works just fine. Besides, even if you wait for 2 years, you still won’t ever have an operating system that’s older than 24 months. I can live with that. Ubuntu.com explains all of this here.

So, do you upgrade Ubuntu every 6 months?? Are you still using XP??

When do you replace public access computers??

eli — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:39:36 +0000

We have 21 public access computers here at our little library. About a third of them are showing serious signs of wear, including 3.5″ floppy drives & USB ports that no longer function. We are going to start replacing these machines this week. We’ve got 5 new Dell Optiplex workstations that we’re going to start deploying in place of our aging Dimension 2400s. We will start by replacing the PACs in the worst condition. These would be machines with a 2.4 Celeron cpu, 256mb RAM, and failed USB ports and floppy drives.

Can Google photograph the entire populated earth??

eli — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:55:18 +0000

Google has photographed many cities for it’s street view. How far can they go? Could they get photos from every city, town, and village in the world? Could they get even more than that? Will street view one day contain images from anywhere but the ‘streets’? Will we see the Google street view airboat speeding through the Florida Everglades? They’ve already done a few National Parks. Will we have a street view boat? The United States does have a National Park in the Dry Tortugas. Maybe we’ll even see street view Antarctica. Just a few years ago would anyone have believed that we’d have something like this available for free, to anyone with a computer and an internet connection?

How to CCleaner — Windows registry cleaning software & more

eli — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:52:23 +0000

CCleaner is a little application that can really clean up your Windows system. It can delete the temporary files that your computer accumulates, clean up the registry, uninstall programs, and help you streamline the startup process. You can download it here. Using it is pretty simple. When you first open it up, you’ll be on the Cleaner tab, where you simply check off which types of temporary files you want it to delete.

The Registry tab works much the same way.

The Tools tab lets you uninstall programs, or choose what your computer will run upon startup.

The Options tab lets you configure how CCleaner works.

Here’s what it looks like in use…

Go Green! Save paper by reading a magazine online… FREE!

eli — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:31:51 +0000

Magazines are printed on paper. The more magazines people buy, the more trees get used up. This is not environmentally friendly, is it?

We all like to read magazines, but who likes the idea of using up the earth’s trees. Well, the Read Green Initiative is offering a free one year subscription to some of your favorite magazines in digital format.

That’ll save some paper!

All you’ve got to do is pick out your free magazine, give them your email address, make a password, and you get one year of that magazine for free!

Enjoy!

Help researchers cure cancer with a simple download

eli — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 15:18:29 +0000

Folding@Home is a distributed computing initiative. People around the world can download and run software that enables them to band together with others who’ve done so to form a kind of super-computer. Each computer aids cancer researchers in performing calculations that would take them years to complete on their own. The software enables your computer to take on a small fraction of the overall computing that the researchers are doing to further their work. Check out their website here.

Using Koha with no internet access

eli — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:01:26 +0000

It is impossible to use Koha if you aren’t connected to your Koha server. This connection may be through your local network, or over the internet. Either way, when that connection is down, you have to resort to a pen & paper. (Unless of course, you have the Koha Offline Client, which we don’t) Here’s what we do when our connection to Koha is down…

We use this method on both of our circulation machines, one’s running XP, the other Ubuntu. Both machines have a scanning gun for reading the barcodes. The only other thing that we use is a simple text file. Here’s how we do it…

I open up the text file (Notepad, or Gedit), scan the patron’s library card, then scan each book’s barcode. That’s it. After each number is scanned the gun automatically hits the ‘Return’ key. After I’ve scanned all the books for a certain patron, I just hit the Enter key to put a space between this patron’s barcodes, and the next.

Then, whenever we get connectivity again, I just copy & paste the numbers into Koha’s staff client. This works best in linux where you can highlight text, and then place the mouse pointer in the box in the Koha staff client and middle-click with the mouse and it will paste whatever you currently have highlighted into the box. That makes this whole tedious process go much quicker. It takes a little bit more effort in Windows because of the whole copy & paste process. Keep in mind to save your text file continually so that you don’t lose all that nice circulation data.

Here’s what the text file looks like…

Doing it like this, especially on the linux box, makes this go MUCH faster than writing everything down, and then manually entering it into Koha once you get connectivity. Not a bad option when you can’t access your Koha servers.