Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
Last updated Aug 5, 1997
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
This document is intended for use within the Duke Physics Department to make it easy for individuals responsible for creating paper documents to also make those documents or variations available on the web and keep them current. Many of the things we now keep on paper and xerox for distribution can be easily converted for web publishing. In some cases this may need to be in addition to the traditional paper copy, but in many cases it can be instead of the paper copy. Anyone who needs a paper copy can easily print one from Netscape.
I'm only going to discuss using Netscape to create and edit documents, but you should also know that WordPerfect can save its documents in html format. If you have an existing text document (with tables but without special symbols) you can take a big first step by opening it in WordPerfect then saving it as HTML.
There are some references to the explicit computer, directory, and file names used on the Duke physics server, but the general methods can be used with any Unix server on which you have a login account with a password. For those of you who may not know, directories and folders are just different words for the same thing.
I am writing mainly for Macintosh and Windows users who wish to learn as little Unix as possible and use it only when absolutely necessary (maintaining standard department web pages will require no Unix at all): those of you who run Netscape Gold in a Unix environment and think those funny looking command strings are the natural order of things will have to make appropriate allowances.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
I recently tried Netscape 4.0 which has the same editing features as Gold 3.0 and no important new ones that I have detected. On my Mac I find it crashes too often when trying to edit and publish so I've gone back to 3.0. Publishing with 4.0 is more complicated in that you must append the file name under which the page will be saved on the server. In the following note I've assumed Gold 3.0 which defaults to the file name on your Mac or PC.
I'll start off with the bad news: Netscape Gold is a memory hog...it requires at least 10 megabytes of available RAM to run on a Macintosh and I'm sure it's something similar on the Windows version. If you can get past that part, the rest is all good news.
Netscape Gold has a built in "what you see is what you get" (wysiwyg) editor that allows you to design, edit, modify, and publish quite sophisticated web pages without looking at a single line of HTML code. There are other programs on the market that offer similar editing and page production features, but as of this writing none had the ability to publish the resulting work.
In this context, the term "publishing" refers to uploading your web page and its supporting files (pictures, backgrounds, linked web pages or whatever) to a directory on your Unix server. This operation requires some care the first time you do it, but after that it's only a couple of clicks to publish a new or updated page to the same server.
This version of Netscape has two modes: browser and editor. They can cause a little confusion because the menu bar changes depending on which mode you're in. If you close your last browser window, you may wonder why some options no longer seem to be available. If you find yourself with only an editor window open, the solution is simple: either go to the File menu and select New Web Browser; or click the Browse icon to see how the Browser itself renders the document you're currently editing. (If you haven't already done so, you'll be asked where to save your current document on your computer before it can be opened in the browser.)
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
To make things work smoothly both on your local computer and on the Unix server, you need to adopt naming conventions that are acceptable to both. Web browsers identify files by their extensions (characters following a period in the file name), so the extension must match the content of the file: html for web pages, jpg or gif for pictures, pdf or ps for files that are coded images of papers or books.
For file names on both computers, I recommend using all lower case letters, underlines instead of spaces, and ending all file names with a period and a two to four letter extension (.html, .jpg, .gif, .pdf, .ps will be the most common). This will allow Netscape to transfer (publish) the files on your computer to the Unix server with minimal fiddling on your part. For example, on my Macintosh I saved this document as web_page_editing.html and that's also its file name on the server. (Unix trained people take note that capital letters should be avoided since neither Macs nor PCs distinguish case in file names.)
If you're building a personal home page to go into your login directory on the "physics" system, I suggest you use the file name index.html since our www server will default to this file name when no specific file name is appended to an http address. To make a home page in your physics login directory (I'll use the name "mydirectory"), you need to make a subdirectory called public_html in your login directory. In the publishing section, you'll see how to transfer the index.html file from your computer to the server.
As a specific example, http://www.phy.duke.edu/~fortney/ will fetch my homepage which I published (stored) as /fortney/public_html/index.html as discussed below. Note that the ~ is used in the http address but not in the publishing address.
Folder (directory) names are not so important since they must be created separately on your machine and on the server, but I also use lower case when naming folders that contain web page data. This sets them apart from my normal folder names.
At this point, before we start using Netscape's editor, I recommend that you make a new folder to hold your local www documents. Something like "www pages" anyplace that's convenient for you.
If you are going to do something complicated with several pages organized in groups of some sort, you might want to create several subdirectories: I recommend using the same directory/folder names and creating the same directory/folder substructure on both your local machine and on the server.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
Crank up Netscape Gold, then select New Document with the Blank option from the File menu. This will get you a window titled Netscape Editor - [Untitled], three rows of editing icons, and a blank page area. If you don't have three rows of editing icons, go to the Options menu item and select all the Show items except the Java Console.
Move your cursor over each of the editing icons, pause briefly (don't click) and read the descriptive words that pop up. Resist the temptation to see what the Table icon does...OK, click on it if you must, but then choose cancel. Tables are important but also complicated so I'll devote a whole section to them.
Before we do anything else, lets give the document a title. Click on the Format item from the menu and select Document. This will bring up a dialog box with fields into which you can type a title, author, and perhaps a description of the document. Don't do anything to the "Location" field: it gets changed automatically when you save. Click on OK to get back to the editor. Note that at the top of this dialog window there are three tabs: General, Appearance, and Advanced. It comes up defaulted to General. Don't worry about the others for now. We'll get to Appearance later; Advanced lets you insert HTML tags that aren't supported by the Netscape Gold editor and that's what we're trying to avoid.
To actually start making a document, click at the top of the blank page, get a vertical cursor, and then start typing something: maybe a section heading, then a paragraph or two of text under it. "Test" (carriage return) and "The quick brown fox" will do.
I'll leave it to you to experiment with the text editing features (you would probably want to make "Test" a heading), but it will be quicker if you know that the styles from the popup and the other seven icons on the lower row affect a whole paragraph (defined by a carriage return), while the six text icons (including the color) on the middle row affect only selected text.
You might have noticed that inserting two or more spaces between characters doesn't seem to work and that the tab button doesn't do what you expect. The bottom line is that you can't arrange things in columns using spaces or tabs. For that you need to use tables.
So far your page is pretty dull as web pages go, but rather than add the bells and whistles, lets first figure out how to get it published.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
When you click on the Publish icon in the upper right or your editing window, Netscape will come up with a dialog box. If you're following these instructions exactly and didn't save first, Netscape will tell you that you must save locally first. Click Save and you'll get the normal save file dialog box for your operating system. Choose a good place to keep your work such as the "www test" folder if you created that earlier. You could have saved your work any time by clicking on the Save icon in the editing window...on a bigger document that's a wise thing to do every with some regularity. If you had done that already, but then made changes to the document, Netscape will simply update the file when you click Save without asking you where to save.
Once saved, you'll next get the real publishing dialog box. At the top after "Publish:" is the name of your file: verify that it is all lower case, has no blanks, and ends in ".html" (without the " of course). If the file name isn't right, choose Cancel, close the document, change the file name, then open the file again by selecting Open Document in Editor from the File menu while in the browser (not editor) mode.
The next line down in the "Publish Files" window says "Include Files:" followed by two buttons. The line should say "Show Files:" since that's what these buttons select, either all of the image files actually in the document, or all files in the same folder as the file you're currently editing. Ignore these buttons for now, but if any files are showing make sure that none are selected (highlighted).
Further down is the "Publishing Location" section. In the long line here you need to type either http:// followed by a string of stuff that reads like a web address, or ftp:// followed by a similar string. At the Duke physics site, we aren't set up to use the http:// form so we must type something like
ftp://www.phy.duke.edu/home/einstein/YOURLOGIN/public_html/
I've used capitals here and in some following lines to indicate words that need to be specialized to your particular account and subdirectory. Eventually, I'm told we will probably be able to drop the node designation "/einstein".
There's a Catch-22 here in that you must have previously logged into your Unix account and made a directory called "public_html", as well as any subdirectories within it that you might like to publish into.
The first part of this string ending in .edu is the IP address of the computer running the server. The remaining words separated by / are nested folders. If you have subdirectories within your public_html directory you can extend this string as needed to publish inside those directories so it looks something like
ftp://www.phy.duke.edu/home/einstein/YOURLOGIN/public_html/SUBDIRECTORY/
You'll also need to type in the name of your account and your password. If you want to make things easier (but less secure) click on the "Save Password" box. Once you have published a document, Netscape will remember the last ten places you've used in a popup menu that's activated by that downward point arrow on the right of the long address box. From this popup you can choose any of the recent places you've published, including your password if you had the box checked when you last used this address. My Netscape seems to get confused at the bottom of this list and selects the wrong item, but most of the time this makes publishing a snap after you once type the correct string.
Click OK and you should briefly see a box indicating that the file is being transferred to the Unix server.
To see if it really happened you can use your browser to open the page using a web address like http://phy.duke.edu/home/einstein/YOURLOGIN/SUBDIRECTORY/
Notice that address starts off with the standard "html://" and that "/public_html/" is missing. This is what's needed on the Duke physics web server: I don't know how common the use of "public_html" is. I've also dropped the www in the IP address since our server will respond to either www.phy.duke.edu or phy.duke.edu. However, I've found that it is necessary to have the "www" in the publishing address.
If you're checking to see if changes to an existing page were made, remember that you'll probably need to click the Reload button on you browser to get the new version.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
Adding links to targets (points of interest) in your current document, other documents or targets within them, or to pictures is accomplished by highlighting the text you want to activate and clicking on the chain (link) icon in the middle of the middle row. This will bring up a dialog box with a wide range of capabilities. If you have picture (.jpg or .gif) files or other pages (.html) files in the same folder where you are saving your current document, and if they are properly named, you can select them by clicking on the Choose file button. This will give you a normal choose file dialog box like you see whenever you need to select a file on your computer. You can change your mind or want to eliminate something that got included unintentionally you can use the Remove link button.
Near the bottom of the dialog box is a scroll list showing targets that exist either in your current document (the default button) or when select in the document you just chose with the Choose file button. If you click on one of the items in the scroll list, it will either become or modify the "Link to" entry. The targets listed are whatever they happen to have been named when they were created. The "Go to" words and numbers in this document are jumps to targets that have been inserted just ahead of the word "Go".
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
One of the fun things about web pages are the various background textures and pictures that jazz up the page. However, these things also dramatically lengthen the time it takes to download a file, so use them sparingly unless they serve some purpose.
Backgrounds are .jpg or .gif files, just like pictures you might use in your document; it's all in how they are used. Netscape will automatically paint a background by reproducing a picture as many times as needed to fill the window. This leads to a tile effect unless the picture is cleverly done so that the top and left edges exactly match the bottom and right ones.
Backgrounds are defined by clicking on Format in the menu and selecting Document. In the dialog box that opens click on the Appearance tab and you'll get a new set of options, mostly grayed out unless you click on the Use custom colors button. If you want to settle for your own set of colors, give this a try.
If you click on the box down at the bottom, you'll get to choose the .jpg or .gif file you want to use as the background.
Pictures can be added with the Add Image icon. Just choose our spot with the cursor then click on the icon. There are more options here than I care to discuss, but you can choose the image you want with the top Choose file button. Some people who don't load images automatically, so it's a good idea to type a description in the "Text" field. You can experiment with the rest of the stuff using the Browse icon to switch between the editor and the browsers view of your document. They won't be identically once you insert pictures and if you have lots of pictures and not much text things probably won't turn out as you wish. Then you have reason to look at the Using Tables section.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
I guess tables are good for actual tables, but they are probably more often used for making columns or controlling how side by side features are arranged. Since you can 'disappear' the lines between cells, the fact that you are using a table structure is not obvious in the finished product.
The Table icon will insert a table at the location of the cursor. The default in the dialog box is a 2 x 2 table, but you can change it as you need. Generally, tables look best centered in a window since you never know how wide the users window is going to be.
The delete key will not delete a table! Use the Edit menu item instead. That's probably the only thing that isn't obvious. Otherwise you can insert text or pictures or both into any cell of a table, and you can insert or delete rows, columns, or cells under either the Edit or Insert menus. The options are many.
You'll find more options for changing the look of a table under the Format menu. On my version of Netscape, the alignment features within a cell appear to do nothing.
A few words of caution: The current version of Netscape Gold has a tendency to crash when you are working with tables. This often happens when you are trying to get the cursor to 'stick' in a particular box of the table since Netscape seems to ignore your clicks if they are not very near the point it expects. Usually this point is in the middle of the box vertically and on the left horozontally. The natural tendency to click quickly here and there in a random search pattern is best surpressed.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
See a web page that you covet? Well if it's got flashing lights and wheels that spin you're on your own. But if it's just text, backgrounds, and pictures you can copy the whole shebang to a folder of your choosing by selecting Edit Document in the File menu. You'll get a dialog box telling you that you may be violating someone's copyright and you might want to give that some thought.
This feature is really useful if you are suddenly given the responsibility of maintaining an existing web page.
I've found that Netscape can give odd results with some web pages that perhaps have non-standard HTML code, or at least code that this editor doesn't understand. The solution is to redo the broken parts using Netscape.
Your downloaded document may show up in the editor with lots of bright yellow flags that look a little like plastic page markers for books. These represent things that the editor doesn't use or interpret. The ones I see most are just comments to help make sense of the HTML code. These you can delete if they annoy you.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
To edit a web page that already exists as a .html file on your computer, just select the Open File in Editor option in the File menu. You can edit a document you are currently browsing by choosing the Edit Document option from the File menu, but if you already have the file on your personal computer this will just waste time and create confusion by either replacing the one you already have or creating another copy somewhere else (if you click without thinking as I sometimes do).
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
One of the most confusing things about getting started with publishing is that the http:// address and path name is not the same as the one you need to use for publishing.
For example, my personal home page in my physics login home directory can be browsed from the address http://www.phy.duke.edu/~fortney/, but it's really looking at a document "index.html" that I published using the address ftp://www.phy.duke.edu/home/einstein/fortney/public_html/. Note that both the IP address name of the computer and the directory path names are different. There are similar differences when publishing into the physics web site, so you must keep the publishing address in a handy place. Netscape will retain it once you've used it, but that's not completely trustworthy. I recommend that you also keep it some place else. On the Mac I use the "Note Pad" feature under the Apple menu to keep a second copy of my publishing addresses.
With our web system the file name "index.html" is the default name of the home page in any directory so if you use this file name for your home page it makes for a shorter web address. The home page for the Duke Physics web site can be browsed using the address http://www.phy.duke.edu/ or even http://phy.duke.edu with the "www" and final "/" omitted, but you're really viewing a document called index.html.
For those of you who will be maintaining standard pages on our web site, we will create the necessary directories on the Unix server and give you special privileges that will allow you to write into those that contain your documents. We will also give you a specific path name to use when publishing into that folder.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
The biggest problem with the web is that pages go out of date because they are too difficult to maintain. We're hoping that Netscape Gold's editing and publishing features will enable us to distribute the burden of keeping our pages current to the people who originate the information. Since these days everyone who keeps information keys it into some sort of electronic media, most of it can be moved to web page format fairly easily. Those of you who maintain simple stuff in Tek should reconsider using the Netscape Gold editor directly. Simple documents created in Word or Word Perfect can be saved as text or simply cut and pasted into a web document. More complicated documents can be saved in pdf format. On a Mac it's best to get the "PDFWriter" chooser extension: this gives you the ability to "print" from any application into a .pdf file. With the correct Netscape pdf plugin or an Acrobat reader from Adobe these are easily opened and scanned from within Netscape.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
Remember that many people scan the web using modems, so keep your web pages simple and provide some warning on links to complicated pages. There's value and purpose to a nice looking web page, but don't make the price of obtaining information too high.
Also many people routinely set their browsers so they don't autoload images, so don't put important links only in picture maps, and do identify pictures with an alternative text description.
Don't use GIFs for general photographic images of people or scenes. JPEG carries more color information, is smaller and faster to load, and will make people with advanced computers think you know what you are doing. Save GIF for graphs, line drawings, and animations, or if you are mostly concerned with how the image will look on 8-bit color monitors (older Macs or PCs and most Unix boxes). Then to be safe you must also be clever enough to choose a browser-safe color palette.
Go to Top, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, Copyright
My personal view of Unix is that it is akin to Kudzu: ugly, unnatural (on this continent), and spreading a suffocating blanket over everything it touches. To survive, I've learned the bare essentials of six or seven commands, and with any luck Unix (or I) will fade away before I have need to learn any more.
pwd: Present Working Directory: Type it and it will give you a string of words and slashes that will tell you where you are in the directory tree. This will give you some clues to finding your publishing address, but you will probably need to experiment by leaving out parts of the string. When I'm in my www public directory this command returns /a/einstein/phy/einstein/home/fortney/public_html, so you can get an idea of what I mean by comparing this with the publishing address above.
cd: Change Directory: Type this to change directories. If you like to type long strings of characters with lots of back slashes you can type "cd " followed by the full path name to a particular directory. Fortunately there are shortcuts. You can go up the tree with something like
cd ./NEXT_DIRECTORY_NAME/ where the "." automatically puts in the all of the pwd stuff.
cd NEXT_DIRECTORY_NAME may do the same thing if your Unix is paper trained.
cd .. will step down one level in the tree
cd ~ will take you to your root directory...the one that shows up when you log in.
ls: List: Type this to display file and folder names in the current directory. ls -l will give you a little more info.
mkdir: Make Directory: To make a new directory (folder) inside your current directory, just type
mkdir ./NEW_SUBDIRECTORY_NAME The preceding period-slash puts this new folder inside the present working directory.
del: Delete a file: The Duke physics version of Unix has implemented this safer method for deleting a file. It's really just a particular form of the following.
rm: Remove a file or folder: This one has lots of nasty options so be careful what you type. For a line hinting at how to use it type "del"...typing "rm" just tells you it's safer to use "del".
mv: Move a file: I use this one to rename a file. Type "mv FILE1 FILE2". For a little more information you can type just "mv", and for a lot more type "man" for manual I guess. This man word works in front of most commands but only occasionally provides illumination.
Back to my home page or to the Duke Physics Home Page