once upon timei used telnet to manage my website at my internet service provider (ispi logged in to the web server in shell windowand performed all my edits directly on the remote machine there was only one copy of site' files--on the machine that hosted it moreovercontent updates could be performed from any machine that ran telnet client--ideal for people with travel-based careers of coursetimes have changed like most personal websitestoday mine are maintained on my laptop and transfer their files to and from my isp as needed oftenthis is simple matter of one or two filesand it can be accomplished with command-line ftp client sometimesthoughi need an easy way to transfer the entire site maybe need to download to detect files that have become out of sync occasionallythe changes are so involved that it' easier to upload the entire site in single step although there are variety of ways to approach this task (including options in sitebuilder tools)python can help heretoowriting python scripts to automate the upload and download tasks associated with maintaining my website on my laptop provides portable and mobile solution because python ftp scripts will work on any machine with socketsthey can be run on my laptop and on nearly any other computer where python is installed furthermorethe same scripts used to transfer page files to and from my pc can be used to copy my site to another web server as backup copyshould my isp experience an outage the effect is sometimes called mirror-- copy of remote site downloading site directories the following two scripts address these needs the firstdownloadflat pyautomatically downloads ( copiesby ftp all the files in directory at remote site to directory on the local machine keep the main copy of my website files on my pc these daysbut use this script in two waysto download my website to client machines where want to make editsi fetch the contents of my web directory of my account on my isp' machine to mirror my site to my account on another serveri run this script periodically on the target machine if it supports telnet or ssh secure shellif it does noti simply download to one machine and upload from there to the target server noreally the second edition of this book included tale of woe here about how my isp forced its users to wean themselves off telnet access this seems like small issue today common practice on the internet has come far in short time one of my sites has even grown too complex for manual edits (exceptof courseto work around bugs in the site-builder toolcome to think of itso has python' presence on the web when first found python in it was set of encoded email messageswhich users decoded and concatenated and hoped the result worked yesyesi know--geegrandpatell us more client-side scripting