General | Tutorials | CGI | DFS info | Upgrade info

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The Student Activity Server has been renamed to the Penn State Student Organizations Web Service and is under new management. These Web pages are out of date and will be removed in the near future. Please read http://www.clubs.psu.edu/info/ for information about the new service.

Authoring a Webpage

So you've just gotten your organization a site on the Activity Server. What now? This page contains information and links that can assist you in the editing of your webpages.

Student Activity Server Specific Guidelines

Some tips and guidelines from the SAS Team:

Tutorials - There are tutorials on accessing your web files on the server.
DCE/DFS information - CAC has provided some good information on the DCE/DFS Service. DCE/DFS is the service where your web files are kept.
Directory Default Pages - The "Root Page", " Directory Index", or "Directory Default Page" is the page people see when they type in your directory. An example is when someone types in http://www.clubs.psu.edu/sas/author/ they are really looking at http://www.clubs.psu.edu/sas/author/index.html. We recommended that you have default pages for your directories so that your web audience can have an easier time finding your site. We also recommend that you use "index.html", although other filenames will be checked as well.

Here are the filenames the clubs server looks for to present as the directory default. The names are in order of the search (it uses the first one it finds) and all file names are case sensitive (they must be lower case):

www.clubs.psu.edu
1. index.html
2. default.html
3. default.htm
4. index.htm
5. index.shtml
6. index.sht
7. index.shtm
8. home.html
9. home.htm
If you do not use a directory default page, the server will list your files. You can change the list of files to check yourself by making a file called ".htaccess" and place the following line in the file:
```
    DirectoryIndex index.html default.asp
```
The above example first checks for a file named index.html (case matters here), and then default.asp if index.html is not present. This file will override the server settings for the directory it is placed in, and all subdirectories. Even though case matters with the default page, it still does not matter for files you explicity link to, such as INDEX.HTML.

Tip for Windows users: you may have to create the text file "htaccess.txt", edit it in notepad, upload it to the server, and then rename it to ".htaccess" (notice the dot at the beginning of the name).
Image File Format - Save photographs as JPEG files and computer drawn images as GIF files to save disk space as well as making downloading faster. You can also save a PNG image as "indexed" like GIF or in RGB or CMYK format like JPEG for photos. We may put some frequently used images and clipart in the /common directory that you can directly link to from your pages to save space. [ May not work yet, stay tuned... ]
Password protection - Some groups may want to restrict sections of their website to only members. This is now possible for webteams to set up. You may restrict access to a directory by setting up an .htaccess file and an .htpasswd file. We now have instructions on use.
CGI (Common Gateway Interface) - CGI is a method for creating interactive webpages. These pages contain information on how to use CGI on this server to create interactive and dynamic webpages (includes counters, form handlers, and database access). These pages are for this server specifically.
Testing - Be sure to test your pages in both Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer since each handles certain HTML tags differently. You may also want to consider other browsers such as Mozilla, Opera, Amaya, Arena, NetPositive for Be, OmniWeb, AOL (before Internet Explorer), WebTV, UP.Browser for Sprint PCS or even lynx. [ This is not even close to a complete list. ]

This page is out of date

Authoring a Webpage

Student Activity Server Specific Guidelines

Recommended reading for beginning web designers