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Probably the most common questions I receive via email about my web pages are requests for help in downloading the images or text on my pages for personal use. I would love to make downloading all my stuff as easy as "point, click, and save" but unfortunately due to space limitations and other factors I can't do that. So in order to help I've written up this general explanation page for all my web projects. It probably won't answer all your questions, but hopefully it'll get you on the right track.
The method I commonly recommend the most for people who want to download a copy of my stuff is to simply print the pages they're interested in from their web browser. This is the method I use myself; I print the different files separately and then put them in a 3-hole binder for easy access. Whenever I make changes or updates to something, I simply print out a new copy of that particular page and replace it in the binder. This also works well during gaming sessions since I can make copious notes in the side bars and blank spaces. Most web browsers have a built-in print feature, usually found under the file or system menu. Yes, this can be a lot of work to display and print each page, but on the other hand you don't have to reprint the entire supplement when I make one minor change to a design.
If you absolutely must have an electronic copy of my stuff, the next easiest thing to do is to save the files to text files straight from your web browser. Like printing, most web browsers have a "save" function built into them allowing you to save the text of a web page into a format compatible with most word processors. If you're really ambitious you can also download the images and insert them into the word processor documents so that you have both images and text in a single file. (See the section below on Downloading Images)
People who use a Unix system to surf the web will need to find a way to download the text (and/or images) from their system if they want to use them on their home computer. I'm sorry, but I CANNOT help you with this; there's no possible way I can know the setup and specifics of every Unix system in the world. You will probably have to transfer the files from the Unix system to a personal computer using an FTP (file-transfer protocol) client or software package. Talk to your local system administrator or lab manager; they should be familiar with how to get files between PCs and mainframes.
I do maintain a small FTP site where I try to keep some text files for people who want to download my stuff all at once via FTP. This FTP site is located at ftp.io.com in the directory /pub/usr/deitrich. You can access this site either by normal FTP or via your web browser. To use your web browser to get there enter the following URL:
ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/deitrich/
Once you enter the URL you should see something similar to the following screen. You can go to a lower directory by clicking on the name, or download a file by clicking on it. Note that some browsers may try to view a text file instead of download it when you click on it, in which case you will need to change the helper applications preferences for your browser so that it will save .txt files to disk instead of view them (check the documentation for your web browser).
You can also access this site using the standard Unix FTP command. Below is a demonstration of an FTP session to ftp.io.com.
Mercury 1> ftp ftp.io.com Connected to ft-meade.io.com. 220 ft-meade FTP server (Version wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-9](1) Thu Feb 29 15:50:44 EST 1996) ready. Name (ftp.io.com:deitrich): anonymous 331 Guest login ok, send your complete e-mail address as password. Password: user@host.domain 230-Welcome to Illuminati Online's Anonymous FTP site. 230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> cd /pub/usr/deitrich 250- 250-Welcome to Dave Deitrich's mini-FTP site! All files in these folders 250-belong to me, and should not be assumed to relate in ANY way to 250-Illuminati Online. Please mail all comments/suggestions to me at 250-deitrich@io.com or deitrich@mcs.net. Enjoy! 250- 250- 250 CWD command successful. ftp> ls 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 344 drwxr-xr-x 6 1511 10 4096 Jan 21 1996 . drwxr-xr-x 227 root root 8192 Jul 16 07:16 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 247 Sep 15 1995 .message drwxr-xr-x 2 1511 10 4096 Nov 9 1995 Dandelions drwxr-xr-x 2 1511 10 4096 Jan 20 1996 MacrossText -rw-rw-r-- 1 1511 100 311707 Jan 21 1996 thirdinvidwar.txt 226 Transfer complete. ftp> cd MacrossText 250 CWD command successful. ftp> ls 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls. total 268 drwxr-xr-x 2 1511 10 4096 Jan 20 1996 . drwxr-xr-x 6 1511 10 4096 Jan 21 1996 .. -rwxr-xr-x 1 1511 10 362 Jan 20 1996 .message -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 22747 Jan 20 1996 fz109-ver11.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 22618 Jan 20 1996 vf11-ver11.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 19271 Jan 20 1996 vf11fa-ver10.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 24821 Jan 20 1996 vf17-ver12.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 26212 Jan 20 1996 vf19-ver10.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 27415 Jan 20 1996 vf19kai-ver09.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 16576 Jan 20 1996 vf1s-ver16.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 17576 Jan 20 1996 vf4-ver11.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 24928 Jan 20 1996 yf19-ver14.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 1511 10 33584 Jan 20 1996 yf21-ver12.txt 226 Transfer complete. ftp> get yf21-ver12.txt local: yf21-ver12.txt remote: yf21-ver12.txt 200 PORT command successful. 150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for yf21-ver12.txt (33584 bytes). 226 Transfer complete. 33584 bytes received in 4.9 seconds (6.7 Kbytes/s) ftp> bye 221 Goodbye. Mercury 2>
Note that if you are using a web browser or FTP client from a Unix account, you will also need to deal with downloading your files from the mainframe to your PC. Talk to your sysadmin or lab administrator for assistance.
ftp.io.com also contains a text file that has all of my Third Invid War supplement in the form of a single text file. This file is called thirdinvidwar.txt and is located in the /pub/usr/deitrich directory. I will try my best to keep this file updated as I make continuing changes to TIW.
NOTE: Images are no longer available from ftp.io.com. They have been removed at the request of the IO sysadmins. If you want to download images from my web pages you will have to get them via the web (see below).
Due to space considerations I can no longer keep an archive of images available for anonymous FTP access. However, I have created several web-based image indices for people who want to view or download the images over the web easily. These indices are listed below:
As my other projects near completion I'll add image indices for those as well. Each of these links connects to an index that lists the name and a description of each image in that directory. If you click on the name of the image, your browser should download that image for you. For some browsers (Netscape in particular) you will need to modify the preferences for .gif files so that the browser will save the image instead of display it. Other non-graphical browsers should automatically save the image for you.
Almost all my images are stored in Compuserve GIF (either gif87 or gif89a) format, so you will need a graphics program such as Photoshop, XV, or JPEGview to view them. Shareware and freeware graphics viewers for a variety of platforms can be found at most major anonymous FTP sites such as wuarchive.wustl.edu. Few word processor programs will read GIF formats, so you will probably need to convert the GIFs to another format if you want to combine them with text files (like TIFF).
Hopefully the above paragraphs will give you some ideas of where to start if you want to download my stuff but don't know how. You'll probably have more questions as you proceed, though, and in those cases I greatly encourage you to talk with your local sysadmins and lab administrators. These people are infinitely more qualified than me to answer your questions, because they know the setup and configuration of your site (which is most likely very different than mine). Even if they don't know the right answers, they should at least be able to point you towards someone who does. So please, talk to them first.
I do most of my web work at night or on weekends. Occasionally I get tired and forget to update the files at io.com. Just let me know what files are missing and I'll correct it when I get a chance.
Not at this time, sorry. First off, I don't have time to put such a file together, and second, I don't have the disk space to store such a file (which would be multi-megabytes in size). If one of you has the time and space for maintaining such a file let me know and I'll be glad to help out any way I can.
Probably not. Printing copies of my stuff and then selling them is like publicly asking to be sued by other RPG companies for copyright infringement. Maybe after everything's done I'll approach the companies and see if they're interested.
If you have other comments or questions please feel free to contact me at deitrich@mcs.net, or use the button below. Take it easy!
| DAVE'S INDEX O' PAGES | DAVE'S LIST O' LINKS |
 http://www.mcs.net/~deitrich/index.html deitrich@mcs.net |
Last Updated: December 28, 1997 |
