3: Uploading Pages

To upload an exercise Page from one of the supported authoring programs, you must first export the exercise as a web page, and you must choose the "browser v6" option - hotpotatoes.net does not support earlier formats. Once you have created the web page, the authoring program will provide an option to upload it to hotpotatoes.net.

You can also use the Masher program, which is part of the Hot Potatoes package, to upload files which are not Hot Potatoes exercises. (For example, you may want to upload documents containing background information for your students to read before they attempt a Hot Potatoes exercise you have created.) The Masher's "Upload to hotpotatoes.net" command enables you to upload a wide range of different file-types, including HMTL and PDF documents, and audio and video files in formats such as MP3 and MOV.

For information about uploading from the supported authoring programs (Hot Potatoes, TexToys, and Quandary), please see the Help file for the program concerned.

Page Titles

The TItle of each Page you upload must be unique - you cannot have two pages with the same title. If you try to upload a Page which has the same title as an existing Page, the uploading program will ask you if you want to overwrite the existing page. If you do, the existing Page will be lost, and replaced by the new one.

Overwriting Existing Pages - What Happens to Results?

When you replace an exercise Page with another of the same title, you may be offered the option to keep the results associated with the old Page. If your new Page is simply an updated version of an existing exercise, it may be sensible to keep the results which were generated by students completing the old version, and attach these results to the new version. Equally, you may not wish to keep the old results, if the old exercise was a completely different one, or if the results are no longer relevant.

If you choose not to keep the old results, they will be deleted, and cannot be recovered - please make sure that you download and save any results you want to keep before you do this. See Results for more information.

Pages and Classes

Each Page can be accessed only from one Class, and you must choose which of your Classes will use the Page when you upload it. After uploading, you can use the Edit option to move the Page to a different Class, but you can never make the same Page available to several Classes.

If you wish to make the same Page accessible to, say, two different Classes, you can do this by uploading it twice, and changing the Page title for each upload. By doing this, you have the same Page available under two different titles, and you can allocate these to two different Classes.

Pages and Assets

Exercises uploaded from Hot Potatoes, TexToys or Quandary, and HTML information pages uploaded using the Masher, are all web pages, and therefore they may contain links to other files. For example, they may include images (in GIF or JPG format) or audio files containing sound. When you create a document or exercise which uses external files, the document itself only contains links to the file locations. The files themselves are not part of the document, but are stored separately, either on your local system, or elsewhere on the internet, and the links in the document tell the computer where to find the extra files.

In hotpotatoes.net, when you upload exercises or other Pages which contains links to external files, there are two possible ways in which each link might be uploaded:

1: If the linked file is not stored locally but accessed via the internet, the upload system simply leaves the link exactly as it was in the original document. This means that when a student views the document, the file will simply be downloaded from its remoteinternet location by the student's computer.

2: However, if the linked file is stored on your own computer, it must be uploaded to hotpotatoes.net along with the document, otherwise your students will be unable to see it. This upload process is entirely automatic - you do not need to upload any such files manually - but you will need to understand how files you upload in this way are named, and how to manage them. Linked files uploaded to your hotpotatoes.net account are called Assets.

For details of how to work with Asset files, please see the Assets section.