Establishing sitewide WordPress file permissions

I don’t see how to do what I think I need in this forum or in the Codex—or I’m not understanding it.

I have been developing a WordPress site in MAMP using my localhost on my Mac. I’ve been uploading to a remote server/shared hosting account to occasionally test the site online. Things were going great until this week.

My most recent edits to my MAMP/localhost site are not showing up after uploading them to the remote site. Specifically, my most recent edits to my customized CSS file, my recent changes to some of my WordPress pages via the content editor and most recent customizations to my widgets are not visible.

I have deleted all the WordPress files on the remote server and dropped all the data in my WordPress database files and re-uploaded all the WordPress files and re-imported with current database file. Done this several times. I have made sure that the site is pointing to the correct address in the wp_options table by making sure that “siteurl” and “home” are set to the correct remote domain url. I even login and make sure I reset my permalinks each time.

When logged into MAMP everything looks as it should. But when viewing my remote site these recent edits are not showing up.

I am using WordPress v3.0.3, MAMP 1.9.4 and Fetch 5.5.3. Upon inspection of my remote site files I see that my file permissions aren’t set correctly and even if this doesn’t fix things I think I need to get a handle on how to set them. I understand that files should be set to 644 and folders to 755.

I understand that setting folders to 755 does not change the files inside, which is a good thing. However, is there a simple way to grab the entire site and change the files to 644 and the folders to 755 without being forced to use Terminal (AKA command line)?

Also, can I set these permissions in localhost and expect the permissions to remain as set on the remote? I don’t see a simple way to do this but can’t imagine that there isn’t a way to accomplish this. Not sure if this will fix my problem but I have to try everything and its information I need to learn anyway. Thanks.