FTP/Web Publishing at AUB

(rev. 2001/04/12)

Document Addressed to:

This document describes the procedure that should be used by faculty and management personnel to publish their home pages under AUB's web site.

Conventions

The conventions used throughout this document are the following:

Italic	is used for the names of the files, directories, host names, web addresses.
Bold	is used to emphasise important terms.

Hardware and Software Requirements

To be able to publish your documents, you need:

1. Network Connected Computer
   Your computer should be connected to AUB's internal network.
2. Web browser
   You need to install a web browser to view your pages. If you need help doing that, give us a call at 2260 and place a service call.
3. FTP-Client
   You also need to install an ftp client in order to publish your files from your PC to the server. Visit the following URL www.aub.edu.lb/pub/internet/ftp (link available only within AUB's campus) for a list of available ftp clients.

User and Server Information

To be allowed to publish on the AUB web site, a user must have a valid AUBnet login ID and a password. Faculty and Management staff must use the same login ID and password they use for their e-mail and internet access.

The server to publish to is:

• Students: www.students.aub.edu.lb
• Faculty/Staff: people.aub.edu.lb
  

The web address for a user's home page will be:

• Students: http://www.students.aub.edu.lb/~'login' where 'login' is the login ID of the user.
  
• Faculty/Staff: http://www.aub.edu.lb/~'login' where 'login' is the login ID of the user.
  

Recommended Publishing Tools

Web Editor :	Netscape Composer, to create your html files
Web Browser :	Netscape Navigator, to view your files
FTP Client :	WS-FTP (for windows) and Fetch (for Mac), to publish your files to the server.

File Naming Conventions

• File names should be a combination of alphabetical letters (upper or lower case)
• No spaces allowed.
• Html files should have an html or htm extension.
• All extensions must be in lower case.
• When creating links, please keep in mind that Windows is case insensitive, while the unix web server is case sensitive.
  For instance, if you create a link to the file cv.html and the file name is CV.html, it will work on windows but not on the server.

Publishing Procedure

This section describes the publishing procedure for IBM clients using WS-FTP.
The process remains practically the same for other ftp clients on IBM or MAC platforms.

1. Create a folder on your local hard disk that would contain your files and sub-folders.
   For example, create the folder c:\homepage.
   Edit and save your files locally in that directory.
2. Preview your files using Netscape Navigator.
3. When you are satisfied with the result, start WS-FTP, connect to the server using your user name and password, use the right and left arrows to transfer selected files and directories from the PC to the server and vice versa.

NB:	After you connect, your remote directory will be automatically set to /<login > where 'login' is your login ID. Under it, you must also find a directory called www. Change to this directory by double clicking on it. You can now publish your documents from your local PC to the server.

Creating a profile in WS-FTP

Instead of typing your username and password each time you want to connect to the server using WS-FTP, you can create a permanent profile in which you specify your username, password, the name of the server you are connecting to, as well as the initial local directory.

1. Start WS-FTP
2. In the Session Properties window click on New
3. Fill in the following fields with the corresponding information :
   • Profile Name: A meaningful label for your connection, for ex. AUB Publishing Site
   • Host Name/Address: people.aub.edu.lb
   • User ID: your UserID for ex. webfoo,
   • Password: your password
   • Click on the startup menu and fill the Initial Local Directory with the directory on your local hard disk that contains your files, for ex. C:\homepage

Relative Links

When you create links between files, make sure you use relative links and not absolute ones. This way you can move all your files from one folder to another on the local disk drive or more importantly to the web server while keeping all the links functional.


Example:

Let's say you have the following hierarchy:



If you want to create a link from the index.html to picture.html, you should point your hyperlink to the file images/picture.html and not /C:/homepage/images/picture.html.
In picture.html, you should point to the file ../index.html to go back to the index.html file.
That way, you won't have to worry about broken links when you publish your documents to the server.