Anansi enables you to upload your new and changed files with only one click. Or to replace all document colors by new ones. Without the Project Manager this wouldn't be possible. The Project Manager keeps account of all the files belonging to your homepage and of all the new and changed files since your last upload.
There's more. As long as you have a simple homepage you will simply store all the files in the same directory. But it won't take long before you start needing subdirectories. Usually you start with a subdirectory for images, then you start organizing other files to other subdirectories too. You'll be glad to have a Project Manager then, because whatever kind of relative linking you need, Anansi will handle it. Even the Upload Manager understands directories and will request permission to make new directories when needed.
Finally, when you want to maintain websites at different locations, you can make a new project for each location. This of course also works for unpublished local homepages, like this manual.
A project is the whole of all the files that make up your homepage or website. Most internetusers only have one provider and therefore one location for their homepage. However, the Project Manager will support an unlimited amount of projects.
Each project can be given its own email address, that will be used for the email links and forms. You can also define a default style for the background and the fontcolors.
Use File| New Project File and File| Open Project File. As long as you use these two functions, the Project Manager will know which files belong to the homepage and which files need to be uploaded by the next FTP-session.
File| Add File and File| Remove File do what they say. Add File will add files of an already existing homepage to your project. Remove File removes files from the project.
Migrating large amounts of files can be done by means of drag and drop. You can drag files from Windows' filemanager. Remember, don't drop them at Anansi's main window, this will be interpreted as an attempt to link. Instead open the File| Open Project File window. Now you can drop all you want, assuming it fits the root directory of the current project.
Forget File| New File and File| Open File. These functions should only be used in case you want to do something without affecting your homepage.
The first time you started Anansi you were guided through setting up your first project. Let's try to do a second project manually. The manual is a complete project in itself so it's suited for using it for this exercise. Open File| Project Manager and press the New button. Give the new project the name Anansi Manual. Then browse for the Project Root Directory, look for the help subdirectory relative to where you find anansi.exe. You should get something like C:\Anansi\Help. Press OK, you're done.
Add all the manual files at once to the project by dragging them from the filemanager - also known as explorer in a later version of Windows. First select File| Open Project File in Anansi. This window is empty. Drag this window to a corner of your screen. Then open the filemanager at the help directory used for the Project Root Directory. You'll see files like manual.htm, man_qck.htm and man_prj.htm (the one you're reading right now). Select all these files starting with man and ending with .htm. Start with the first one, hold down the Shift key and select the last one. Then drag them to the Anansi window in the corner. The selected files will appear in the list.
That's all. You've defined a new project and added a series of existing files to it. It takes much longer to read about it then to do it. Switch back to other projects by rightclicking at the filename part of the statusbar. This will pop up the projects menu, listing all projects known to Anansi.
Read the helpfile on using the project settings | Troubleshooting