SmartFTP trouble

I know I'm probably in over my head here so I will apologise for my stupidity on this subject right now. Anyways, after running SmartFTP and logging into my site I tried editing a portion of my site and it took me to Word. I made the small change and after uploading it I noticed that the website page I had edited was now messed up. Was I suppose to edit the page in dreamweaver or something else? Thanks for any help, its much appreciated.

I know I'm probably in over my head here so I will apologise for my stupidity on this subject right now. Anyways, after running SmartFTP and logging into my site I tried editing a portion of my site and it took me to Word. I made the small change and after uploading it I noticed that the website page I had edited was now messed up. Was I suppose to edit the page in dreamweaver or something else? Thanks for any help, its much appreciated.

Hi, Rob,

Well, pages on the Internet are written in a combination of languages, none of which are Microsoft Word. They includes HTML, Javascript, CSS, and others.

The basic structure of Internet pages has to be written in html or a variant such as XML. You do not have to produce these in Dreamweaver - you can use Notepad, for instance - but they still hav to conform to a basic structure based on html.

Word is used for documents to be printed. While you can export Word files in an html format, it's terrible, bloated code and will not validate.

All I can suggest now is to download the page which no longer works, open it in a code editor (DW is great but there are also many free editors available), extract the content, write a new valid html page using that content, then re-upload it. Leave Word entirely out of the process.

Hey Rob,

I think your primary issue is that you don't have the proper default editor defined in Windows or SmartFTP... I've run into this before. Example, I didn't have a default editor defined for PHP file types, and every time I clicked on a PSP file, it would open in word. I agree with the last poster, Word is the worst possible option for editing HTML (or any over web file types for that matter) because it adds all kinds of ridiculous code that will confuse my web browsers.

You can define which editor SmartFTP will launch when using the right click, edit command, for specific file types, by going to Tools>Settings>Remote Edit.

I would suggest setting the "By default use" item to "File Viewer configured in General page" option, which should prevent unknown file types from being opened up in word ;-)

Personally, for quick edits (simple changing of text on a webpage) I just use NotePad, but I prefer DreamWeaver for detailed edits. See below for some free alternatives.

PSPad - http://www.pspad.com/

Notepad++ - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

CodePad http://shicola.wz.cz/codepad/

jEdit http://www.jedit.org/


Danny