I have used http://www.web2ftp.com for the very purpose you speak of, it supports Remote FTP with a choice of SSL

Earlier this year I was on holidays in the south coast of New South Wales (Australia) when a client frantically emailed me saying that their Products page mentioned a shirt which was described as:

“White [name of company with crocodile logo] fabric ”

Thanks to http://www.web2ftp.com I had the offending name removed in a few minutes, the client was happy and the [name of company with crocodile logo] stopped badgering them :-)

Note: the interface is in German but after a bit of experimenting you will know what each button does

And of course, there’s the lovely direct style-sheet editing trick (where you put the path to your style sheet in first the output file field and then linked file fields) which obviates the need for rebuilds and lets you edit the file either through the web browser or the file system.

Yes, a lovely tip indeed…

Doug wrote:
“It can actually be used to edit any text-based file within its reach.”

That’s the catch. At least with 2.661 (haven’t tried with MT 3), you could not edit certain files (for example .pm and .cgi files to name a few) for security reasons. That is, unless of course, you hack MT to allow you to do so (ahem). Of course, I wouldn’t recommend it on a shared installation.

alex wrote:
“Each day it seems like MT is getting more powerful, leading to much more complexity and additional headaches”

Actually, this “feature” has been available since the very first version of MT three years ago so it has lent no extra complexity to MT.

Anyhow, to your point, there is no doubt that more power often leads to more complexity, although certainly it doesn’t have to be proportional. By its very nature, server-side software will always require more knowledge on the part of the user than a hosted service.

Six Apart has and continues to put a great deal of effort into making things as simple as possible for those who aren’t so tech savvy. If you think things are complicated now, you are probably unaware of what you are currently being sheltered from and exactly how bad it could be had such care not been taken in the past by the 6A techies.

alex wrote:
“Is there a MT_Lite version that doesn’t try to be the “everything you ever wanted to do on a blog” tool?”
[...]
“frustrated that the hurdle to enter a personal blog is getting higher that my options are blogger or livejournal.”

In case you haven’t seen it, TypePad is essentially the “MT-Lite” you are looking for although, in terms of features, you don’t lose much and in fact even gain some new features before they get rolled into MT.

I have found that installing the Invision file manager has been worth it. I originally installed it for clients to allow them to edit files directly on their site without them requiring an SFTP/SSH account, but I have used it more than once when in a similar situation you describe. It’s not large so having it on there is nice to know that I can access everything on my site when I don’t have any tools apart from a browser.

As an additional note, you might add that users should make sure they don’t set MT to automatically rebuild these non-blog files – it’s obvious really, but could easily cost you some unwanted extra bandwidth/server load.

Is there a MT_Lite version that doesn’t try to be the “everything you ever wanted to do on a blog” tool?

I read stories about how people knocked their heads against the wall configuring the updates, working late nights, and trying to get everything working right. It’s scary.

Why can’t we keep it simple(r)?
What about a “presentation management” layer, just like the content management?

frustrated that the hurdle to enter a personal blog is getting higher that my options are blogger or livejournal. even blogger is becoming complicated with all the options and profiles and all. At least they allow email posting.

Great tip, though. I have all of the pages on my site set up as editable templates, even the ones that MT isn’t involved with, in case I need to make a quick edit.

Likewise as someone said above, putty + USB pen works well, provided the security policy of the local machine is not too strict.

James Z – Quite a lot of webcafe’s I know of don’t like customers sticking their own stuff into the pc’s. Don’t know if that’s just here though, or my lack of luck.

What you were seeing must have been some other type of glitch with your connection, or possibly you had an older cached version of the style sheet that needed updating…