Problems editing website locally

[bagudu]

I work from home running Contribute 4 on an XP machine, SP 2 etc etc fully up
to date.. Even with quite a good broadband connection, it is slow and messy to
edit and upload every page of my new site on the remote server. It would like
to edit a local copy on my hard drive, then upload it in bulk.
I tried this and it was a big mess.
I created the local connection just by browsing Contribute to the folder on
my hard disk. This gave an error (sorry now lost) but then seemed to work well.
I may or may not have got this right.
Then I made what was almost certainly a mistake, and uploaded the files from
C: to the server with an FTP client.
After this, Contribute was permanently confused about which connection it was
working with. Even after I deleted the connection to the hard drive to work
only with the remote server, when I tried to construct links it still offered
only addresses from the now-deleted connection on the hard drive. After a while
it spontaneously opened each and every one of the dozens of gifs and jpgs on
the page as an individual draft, then complained "there were duplicates already
on the server and did I want to save with a new name or overwrite?" and it took
so long to save them all individually that the program was unusable and I had
to re-install it.
Even after that, the problem with opening all the gifs etc repeated itself, so
I assume the server was corrupt and have now re-initialised the server from
backup and am about to re-install contribute yet again.

I have yet to fall in love with Contribute!!!

So
(1) can I create the website locally and then upload in bulk?
(2) if so how?

Many thanks for your input

Andrew White
Bristol UK

[Tom Benjamin]

Hi Andrew,

If you can set up a website on your XP machine you can set Contribute to work
on that local copy and safely use an FTP client to upload to your remote
server. That would even let you choose not to upload the Contribute _notes,
_baks and _mm folders.

Tom

( I used to live in Bristol many years ago)

[bagudu]

Hi Tom,
So if I understand you rightly, it is the _notes, _baks and _mm folders which
cause the confusion? If I wanted to, I could use Contribute both on the hard
disk and on the remote server, just as long as I make sure these sets of files
remain distinct - it that correct?
Of course I guess it may be simpler and safer to just edit the set on the hard
disk, and never use Contribute on the server at all.
Many thanks for your reply.

Andrew