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This page provides, in reverse chronological order, a summary of announcements and of links to new resources for Ohio University Web authors. The links to the right provide shortcuts to the more recent items. |
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Revised March 16, 2000
We now have two sets of shared graphic images for use on Ohio University Web pages:
In order to take advantage of these shared images, and to be able to view your pages that use them while testing from your hard disk, organize your hard disk's Web files as outlined in Chapter I of the Pagemasters' How-to (Memo 85) (which is also available through the "nuts and bolts" shorcut on the pagemasters' toolbox home page). If you have already done so, then all you need to do is to create another folder, named "images", in your "www" folder, next to the folder named "ougifs". Finally, copy the images that you will use into that folder.
This is especially valuable for situations where testing from your hard disk is not possible:
On-line testing also permits other people to review your pages from their own computers, before you go public with the new pages. This makes it easier to gather feedback about new designs and therefore will improve the overall quality of our Web site.
Because these are test sites, we do not want any of the pages to be included in any keyword search index, such as AltaVista or Excite. Therefore it is vital that you create no Web pages with links leading to any page using the 8080 port on the Front Door server. That is why the URLs in the table below are presented as simple text, not as clickable links. Type the test URL into your browser once, to open the page, and then set a bookmark to it.
Each authorized user of the Front Door server should create a folder named "TEST" in the account's login directory (adjacent to the folder named "WWW" that contains the files for the "production" Web site).
Files located in the TEST directory will be displayed with the same URL that your regular files use, except for the insertion of the colon and the port number. For example:
Production URL |
Testing URL |
| http://www.ohiou.edu/ | http://www.ohiou.edu:8080/ |
| http://www.ohiou.edu/ourdept/index.html | http://www.ohiou.edu:8080/ourdept/index.html |
| http://www.ohiou.edu/operations/ | http://www.ohiou.edu:8080/operations/ |
For most people, we believe the best approach to populating your TEST subdirectory is to upload the files from your hard disk, just as you have done with the production directory. If you have so many files and folders that this seems unduly burdensome, please contact the Academic Technology Manger (593-1017, or acatec@www.ohiou.edu) for assistance.
We have prepared separate notes on the procedure for managing the transition from testing to production for a new Web site or a massively revised Web site. For small changes, just upload the files to their production locations, as soon as testing is completed. Remember that pages using the new look and feel must not be placed in their production directories until after the new Front Door is in production, which is currently planned for early May.
Duplicating all of your files in the TEST folder may run you close to, if not beyond, your disk space usage quota. If everyone does so, the server will be very tight on disk space. Please see the discussion on file housekeeping in Chapter II of the Pagemasters' How-to (Memo 85). If you run out of disk space, please contact Computer Services for an increase in your authorized disk quota on the Front Door server. Be sure to let us know the URL of your home page, so that we can increase the correct quota! You may call the Academic Technology Manager at 593-1017, or send E-mail to acatec@www.ohiou.edu or to oak.support@ohio.edu.
The test server will be up and running most but not all of the time. Re-configuring the test server environment (for example, to add a new tilde-free URL) requires that the test server software be shut down entirely and re-started from scratch. This takes a couple of minutes, and will not interfere with your ability to upload files, only with your ability to view them. Similar re-configuration of the production server can be performed by issuing a "restart" command to the server software, which takes a matter of seconds to execute. Therefore, you may notice that the test server seems somewhat less stable than the production server. Just try again in a few minutes. If you ever experience sustained misbehavior of the test server, please call the Support Center, at 593-1222, to inform Computer Services, so that we can fix it.
The files that you use during on-line testing will require little or no modification in order to be placed into production, when the time comes. Just be sure to follow these rules:
If you are responsible for multiple first-level URLs, do not use "../" to get from one to the other, use either of the methods presented in points 4 and 5.
This is a change from our previous recommendation!
For example, you could build a page with a link to "/employees/index.html" that would work during testing, because testing would be performed on "http://www.ohiou.edu:8080/", and would work unchanged when moved to your WWW folder after the new Front Door is in production, on "http://www.ohiou.edu/", even though it would fail if put into production right now, because the old Front Door has no such URL. These links will not work from your hard disk, but will work from the server during on-line testing.
This is not a problem in a pure-navigational page (which has links only to other pages), only in a page that has both text content and an imagemap for shortcuts that jump down to that text content.
Pages with this problem will re-display at the top of the page, instead of jumping down to the intended place, when you click on that shortcut; the other shortcuts, that lead to other Web pages, will work correctly, even without changing the imagemap data files. They will, of course, work faster if you make the change, as we described in the earlier news item, below.
Pages with this problem will generate an error message page, instead of displaying the correct or any other page, for all of the shortcuts in that imagemap.
You can check your Web pages by clicking on the shortcuts, to confirm that they work. You should be able to fix any problems by changing the absolute URLs (in the imagemap data file in case 1, and in the HTML file in case 2) to the new, tilde-free form.
Since the change is a global replacement operation (sometimes called "find and replace"; for example, I just changed every instance of "/~acatec/" to "/acatech/" in this file), it should be quick in any text editor or word processor.
If this presents a problem for you, please contact Dick Piccard by E-mail (piccard@ohio.edu) or phone (593-1017).
We will also consider requests for sub-units to have their own accounts on the server, and therefore to have shorter URLs. For example, Student Activities' Web pages are currently within the Student Affairs account, and so have URLs such as "http://www.ohiou.edu/~deanstu/studact/"; with their own account on the server, their URL might become "http://www.ohiou.edu/studact/". Changes of this type do require modifications (mostly minor ones) of the existing departmental Web page files, as well as server software re-configuration.
We plan to implement these changes as soon as possible, so that they can be in place as the Front Door is re-designed. We therefore need each department's responses to the action items listed below:
The sooner we have your response, the sooner your new URL will be in place. We will notify you as soon as the change has been made.
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact Tracy Corrigan (corrigat@ohio.edu; 3-0966) or Dick Piccard (piccard@ohio.edu; 3-1017).
The global change to tilde-free URLs for departments and offices is possible now because Computer Services has purchased and installed a new server system for the Front Door, with more RAM and a faster CPU. For more information on the new server, please see the Front Door credits page and the December 21, 1998, entry in "http://www.ohiou.ed/pagemasters/news.html".
When this change is implemented, there will be no need for any immediate changes to any department web pages. Any attempt to use the old URL (whether by using an old bookmark, by following a link on a page or from a search engine, or by typing the URL directly into the browser) will bring up the appropriate page. Any attempt to use the new URL will of course also bring up the appropriate page. In other words, both old and new URL addresses will work. Regardless of the URL address used, the new URL address will show up in the browser's location information.
We do encourage you to modify your pages to reflect the new URL addresses as soon as is convenient. This will mean revising the contents of all imagemaps, and any places in the HTML files where an absolute URL is used, either in the visible text or inside the HTML tags. You may choose to put off making some of these changes until you are ready to modify the pages as part of your own new re-design in conjunction with the University's overall redesign. Making these changes for the imagemap data files, for the links, and for the images, will speed up the loading of your pages, and will improve the indexing of your pages for keyword searching.
When revising the imagemaps and HTML, please be sure to use the short name for the server (i.e., use "http://www.ohiou.edu/whatever/" rather than any of the longer names that also work ("http://cscwww.cats.ohiou.edu/whatever/" or "http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/whatever/"). This change was described in some detail in "http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/news.html" on April 8, 1998.
Except for sub-units that are "promoted" to have their own accounts, you will continue to maintain your HTML documents on the server the same as before, logging in with the same username and password you have been using, and placing them in the same sub-directories. Your E-mail address on the server for comments and suggestions (e.g., "acatec@www.ohiou.edu") will not change before the "@", but the part after the "@" should be "www.ohiou.edu" in accordance with the previous paragraph.
Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/news.html) on the date indicated for the first entry, above.
All comments, criticisms, and suggestions for modification gratefully accepted by E-Mail to acatec@www.ohiou.edu.
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