FTP: There Has To Be A Better Way

2 April
22 Comments
by nickycakes

If you’re a webmaster or coder like Nickycakes, you rely quite heavily on transferring files back and forth from your hard drive to your webhosting server.  With the most rudimentary of ftp programs, the process goes something like this:  1) write code 2) upload it to the server with ftp 3) test it 4) make changes 5) upload to server again, etc.  This can be quite annoying, so what Nickycakes first did was set up a webserver on his home machine to test everything first before uploading it to save some time.  That works OK, but hosting a test server can be annoying, and you still eventually have to ftp everything to the server, and you run into issues with different versions of files in different places, etc.  Short story: BIG HEADACHE.

The next step up from just your basic ftp program in terms of productivity would be a more advanced ftp client like SmartFTP.  The main reason Nickycakes likes SmartFTP and programs like it is the ability to right-click and click edit on a file on the remote server, allowing you to edit the file locally and then upload when you’ve finished making the changes.  There are, of course, drawbacks to this.  The main one being you can’t edit more than one file at a time, which is many times required when you start working on big projects.  Again: BIG HEADACHE.

A few weeks ago, a buddy on IRC mentioned a program he uses to map a remote FTP directory to a local drive in windows.  It wasn’t until yesterday that Nickycakes had enough with FTP clients and look into this solution.   The Cakes tried two different programs for this, which do pretty much the exact same thing: Webdrive and SFTPDrive.

They were pretty much identical in functionality, but had a few small….availability issues.  Webdrive is produced by a company in Nickycakes’ home town of Annapolis, MD, however, has a much shorter free trial period and is less…available…on *ahem* piratebay… So the winner ended up being SFTPDrive, even though they’re both about the same.

Just since yesterday this has done a few things to the way Nickycakes operates when designing and fixing his stuff online.  First off, things are much faster.  Creating and launching new php code has had a few major steps removed from the process which is awesome.  But the biggest improvement has been the ability to seamlessly switch from computer to computer to do coding work.  Before, Nicky had to set up shared folders on the main local computer with all the files he was working on if he wanted to switch to a different pc to do some work (for example going out to a cafe with the laptop).  Now, it’s as easy as installing PSPad (cakes’ editor of choice) and this SFTPDrive and let the fun begin.

That’s about it.  Hope this saves you a ton of time.  Keep it real.

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