UofL Web Publishing Frequently Asked Questions

This FAQ contains the most common questions about using the World Wide Web at the University of Louisville.

Contents:

Browsing Questions

1. Why does the red lettering blend into the red stripe, making it impossible to read?
2. Why do I get "permission denied" when I try to view a page I just created?
3. Can I use Netscape/MSIE to read my mail?

Searching Questions

1. Searching Web Pages and People Search at UofL
2. FAQ - How to use the Search capability at UofL
3. FAQ - How to change your information in the Online Directory at UofL

Authoring Questions

1. How do I set up a home page?
2. Where are UofL Web pages stored?
3. Why can't I edit my department's files?
4. Can I change the permissions of my files without logging in to Athena with telnet?
5. How do I add a counter to my page?
6. How do I restrict pages to only people within .louisville.edu?
7. How do I restrict pages by username/password?
8. How do I redirect users from my old location to my new one?

Graphics Questions

1. What graphics file formats should I use?

File Transfer Questions

1. How can I send my Web files from my desktop to Athena?
2. Why can't I FTP my files?
3. When I FTP my files, why aren't they automatically accessable from my web browser?

Browsing

1. Why does the red lettering blend into the red stripe, making it impossible to read?

   Quite possibly the problem is in your browser. If your browser does not support Tables then the text will not indent correctly past the red browser that supports Tables, since they are, after all, a standard part of HTML. Get NCSA Modaic, Netscape or MS Internet Explorer, the page looks fine on all of those browsers.

2. Why do I get "permission denied" when I try to view a page I just created?

   That means that you have not set the permissions correctly on your new HTML files. You need to turn on the READ permission for everyone. Do this with the following command:

         chmod a+r *html

   You can also change the permissions of files through FTP. To keep this problem from happening every time you send a file, you can set what you want the permissions to be when you FTP files to athena.

3. Can I use Netscape/MSIE to read my mail?

   Yes you can. Just point your browser to http://webmail.louisville.edu/

Authoring

1. How do I set up a home page?

   Go to the "World Wide Web Services" page. If you want to set up your own personal home page, read the "How to Set up Your Own Page" page. If you want to set up a unit, department, or group page, read the "How to Set up a Unit Page" page.

2. Where are UofL Web pages stored?

   The main UofL Web server is on the Athena AIX machine. The HTML files are all stored in a directory called www at the root of the Athena file system. The subdirectories in the www directory are arranged in a hierarchy roughly corresponding to the organization of the university. Refer to the Web Directory Structure page to see how things currently are arranged.

3. Why can't I edit my department's files?

   Even though you are a member of the access group for your department's web directory you might not be able to get to the files right away. There are two reasons:

   1. The files have been assigned the wrong permissions. The person who created the files need to set group write permission on for the files with the following command:

            chmod g+w *

      This will turn on write permission for the group for all the files in that directory for which the user is the owner.

   2. The file is set to the owner's group rather than the department's WWW group. The owner of the file needs to log into athena using telnet and issue the following command in the department's web directory (replace dept with your department's group name:

            chgrp w-deptgroup *

4. Can I change the permissions of my files without logging in to athena with telnet?

   If you are using WS-FTP, yes you can. In WS-FTP, right-click anywhere on the grey part of the window and you will get a pop-up menu. Go into the "FTP Commands >" submenu and use the "SITE" command. This command will allow you to issue the "chmod" command just as you would if you were at the Unix prompt. For gif, jpeg, and html files you should use "chmod 664 name"; for subdirectories and any HTML files which run CGI programs, you should use "chmod 775 name" (obviously replacing the word "name" with the name of the file or directory).

5. How can I add a counter to my page?

   You can keep track of the number of hits to your page by using the Count CGI program. Look at the help file to see how to do it.

6. How do I restrict pages to only people within .louisville.edu?

   Restricting a directory to .louisville.edu just requires the creation of a file called ".htaccess" in the directory with the following content:

        <Limit GET>
        order deny,allow
        deny from all
        allow from .louisville.edu
        </Limit>
   

   Make sure the .htaccess file is world-readable, and the directory, all pages within it, and all directories within it will be only accessible to people coming from a machine connected to the university's network.

7. How do I restrict pages by username/password?

   If you set up pages on the UofL Intranet Server (uofl.louisville.edu) you can easily tell the server to ask the user for his or her UofL Unified UserID and DCE password (the same one used for UofL.net Remote and Athena). To do this, create a file called ".htaccess" in the directory you want to protect. Place the following text in the .htaccess file:

        AuthType Basic
        AuthDCE On
        AuthName UofL
        require valid-user
   

   If your pages are on www.louisville.edu then restricting a directory or directories full of web pages to people who know a username/password is done with two files. The first file is the .htaccess file. This file needs to be placed in the directory to be restricted. An .htaccess file that would restrict a directory by password would look like this:

        <Limit GET>
        AuthName "UofL Auth"
        AuthType Basic
        AuthUserFile /web/content/PATH/_TO_/HTPASSWD/_FILE/.htpassword
        AuthGroupFile /dev/null
        require valid-user
        </Limit>
   

   The phrase_to_show_up_in_browser_window is a bit of text that will show up in the password dialog window of the user's browser. The PATH_TO_HTPASSWD_FILE is a path to a file you will create in the next step. It should be something like /web/content/www/something/else/htpasswd. It shouldn't be within your www directory or within a departmental www hierarchy. This file will be created with the following command:

         htpasswd -c /some/directory/htpasswd username

   Where username is the username you wish to add. The htpasswd program will then prompt you for the user's password twice. This must be done from the UNIX command prompt. Once this is done and the .htaccess file and the htpasswd file are both set to world readable, the directory should be protected. Simply use the htpasswd command to add more accounts.

8. How do I redirect users from my old location to my new one?

   You can create an .htaccess file that contains a line like the following:

         RedirectPermanent /~jqpubl01/old/ http://www.louisville.edu/~jqpubl01/new/

   This will redirect visitors and web search engines to your new permenant location. The first word "RedirectPermanent" is a key word indicating that there has been a permanent change.

   The second part of the line is a modified version of the old address. The only modification is that everything before the third slash / is not entered.

   For our example, the old address was http://www.louisville.edu/~jqpubl01/old/. The modified version is /~jqpubl01/old/.

   Here is another example, with the modified part in bold: http://www.louisville.edu/alumni/

   The third part is the address of the new location. In our example, it was http://www.louisville.edu/~jqpubl01/new/.

   For more detail you can look at the Apache Documentation that discusses the Redirect directive.

Graphics Questions

1. What graphics file format should I use?

   There are two main graphics formats that are readable by the majority of graphical browsers: GIF and JPEG. Other graphics file formats will require either a separate program or a plugin to view. Here are some basic guidelines for which of the two main formats to use when, taken from the JPG FAQ:

   • JPEG is *not* going to displace GIF entirely; for some types of images, GIF is superior in image quality, file size, or both. One of the first things to learn about JPEG is which kinds of images to apply it to.

   • Generally speaking, JPEG is superior to GIF for storing full-color or gray-scale images of "realistic" scenes; that means scanned photographs and similar material. Any continuous variation in color, such as occurs in highlighted or shaded areas, will be represented more faithfully and in less space by JPEG than by GIF.

   • GIF does significantly better on images with only a few distinct colors, such as line drawings and simple cartoons. Not only is GIF lossless for such images, but it often compresses them more than JPEG can. For example, large areas of pixels that are all *exactly* the same color are compressed very efficiently indeed by GIF. JPEG can't squeeze such data as much as GIF does without introducing visible defects. (One implication of this is that large single-color borders are quite cheap in GIF files, while they are best avoided in JPEG files.)

   • Computer-drawn images, such as ray-traced scenes, usually fall between photographs and cartoons in terms of complexity. The more complex and subtly rendered the image, the more likely that JPEG will do well on it. The same goes for semi-realistic artwork (fantasy drawings and such). But icons that use only a few colors are handled better by GIF.

   • JPEG has a hard time with very sharp edges: a row of pure-black pixels adjacent to a row of pure-white pixels, for example. Sharp edges tend to come out blurred unless you use a very high quality setting. Edges this sharp are rare in scanned photographs, but are fairly common in GIF files: consider borders, overlaid text, etc. The blurriness is particularly objectionable with text that's only a few pixels high. If you have a GIF with a lot of small-size overlaid text, don't JPEG it. (If you want to attach descriptive text to a JPEG image, put it in as a comment rather than trying to overlay it on the image. Most recent JPEG software can deal with textual comments in a JPEG file, although older viewers may just ignore the comments.)

   • Plain black-and-white (two level) images should never be converted to JPEG; they violate all of the conditions given above. You need at least about 16 gray levels before JPEG is useful for gray-scale images. It should also be noted that GIF is lossless for gray-scale images of up to 256 levels, while JPEG is not.

File Transfer Questions

1. How can I send my Web files from my desktop to Athena?

   If you are connected to the UofL Ethernet, or you are connecting from home using PPP, you can send files directly from your desktop computer to athena using an FTP program. On a Macintosh you can use Fetch. In Windows you can use WS-FTP.

   If you are connecting using an ISN line or using a standard terminal program through a modem, then you can use either Z-Modem or Kermit to send the files.

2. Why can't I FTP my files?

   Either you are not a member of the department's access group or the directory itself does not have group write permission set; in which case the owner of the directory needs to login to Athena using telnet, go to the directory in which the department's web directory is stored, and issue the following command (replacing dept with the name of the department's diectory:

         chgrp g+w dept

3. When I FTP my files, why aren't they automatically accessable from my web browser?

   On Athena your files are automatically protected against anyone else reading them. When you upload a file using FTP you can specify what you want the permissions to be:

   On the Macintosh...
   Using the "Fetch" FTP program you can use the "Set Upload Permissions..." in the "Remote" menu.

   In Windows...
   Using WS-FTP you can set the "umask" to 002. To do this, right-click the mouse with the pointer anywhere in the grey area of the window. You will be presented with a menu. Choose the "FTP Commands >" submenu and choose the "SITE" command. This will allow you to issue a command to the FTP site you are connected to. Type the following command:

         umask 002

   This command will tell WS-FTP to give you and your group both read and write permissions, to the files you download but everyone else will only be able to read them.