Site maintenance for two

[ronaldb66]

Hi all,

me and a buddy of mine created a site to display our hobby.
It's built locally on his machine and gets uploaded from there, so he basically does most of the work. Whenever i pitch in it means taking the driver's seat behind his tube and solving some problems he has encountered.

A far better solution would be if we both could work on it on seperate machines on different locations but we don't have networked machines at our disposal.

My questions:

1. did anyone encounter such a situation?
2. does anyone have a suggestion for a setup that might make the above possible?

I thought about having the online version be the leading one (making local backups say, once a week), and downloading every document that needs work from there.
Of course, that would require some coordination as to who does what.

Thanks in advance for your reponses!

[jalarie]

No matter how you do it, you'll need to properly coordinate your efforts.

One possibility is for him to run an FTP server on his machine, posibly starting and stopping it when he needs or does not need your help. You pull a copy from his machine, work on it, put it back, and optionally copy it to the net.

[murphyz]

Have you looked into Dreamweaver MX?
It would be possible for you to connect to the remote site using DW and getting the files that need to be worked on from there.
MX gives you the ability to 'check out' files so that no-one else can work on them at the same time and so you can check on whether files are being worked on. Once the file is correct just log it back in and that's you.
It's also possible to post comments about relevent pieces of the site as a way to keep each other informed.

As far as other co-ordination goes. A simple email back and forth would make it clear what you are both working on, what you want the other to do, and any plans for the future.

Mxx

[duniyadnd]

Or if you don't want to run through the whole hassle of setting up a server from his computer, put a backup on a geocities server or similar, and use those to work out the problems, as it is virtually accessible from anywhere.

Duniyadnd

[ronaldb66]

Thanks everyone for replying; i might have mentioned that he is used to Frontpage which is unable to download a remote site and still have it work as it should (been there, done that). I would really like to see FP go, so DW MX sounds like a really interesting substitute.
I'm strongly leaning towards having the remote site being leading and downloading stuff that needs work from there; coordination is not likely to become a problem, since we literally live a stonethrow away from oneanother.

[Mhtml]

I have DW MX and it has options specifically for this as mentioned above. I am yet to use them but it seems to be quite good. You can add notes to your pages etc to show what you have update.