Re: Should we make a www group?

[Donovan Rebbechi <elflord@pegasus.rutgers.edu>]

On Thu, 10 Jun 1999, Rune Christiansen wrote:

> Since there are several volunteers for maintaining the Independence web
> site, maybe we should try to form a kind of group, a www_admin???

there's already a group called "indy". 

> I must confess, that about 2 minutes after replying to the original "A
> web designer needed" mail, I started making a new version of the
> web site (text-only). I will upload a sample later at my web site, but
> maybe we should create a graphical version and a text version?

not really necessary. The current version is readable in lynx.
We could do it, but you'd need to use some perl scripts that could convert
one to the other. Maintaining two websites is too labor intensive

> I do:
> 
> 1. All HTML (I *never* do frames!)

Cool. If we don't do frames ( which has been the policy to date ), then we
needn't do a seperate text only site. 

>      Note on HTML: I am very concerned about syntax, "clean-code"
>      etc. and I always code by hand!

So do I (-; Actually, the WYSIWYG editors I've used by and large have
problems and output broken html

> 2. Advanced Server Side Includes (Can this feature be used on the web
> site???)

Checking the apache config file ... looks like you can.

> 3. Basic graphics (dots, lines etc., nothing fancy)
> 
> Now, what can you guys do?

I write perl scripts to generate html ( the /software section ). I also
wrote a number of shell scripts that maintain consistency in the page
headers ( you can do the same thing using frames, but I hate frames ... ) 

Now some notes about writing the webpage : 

(a)	you should have apache installed on your own machine, and have a
complete mirror of the website on your disk (make a user called indy and
put it in indy's public_html directory ). The website wants to be at
the root of its domain.  Make an /etc/hosts entry for independence
(127.0.0.1) and configure a virtual host in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
DocumentRoot /home/indy/public_html
ServerName independence
</VirtualHost>  

(b)	nightly tarballs of the site ( excluding /software which is
automatically generated )  are available at
http://cran.seul.org/~donovan/indy.tar.gz
This is generated by a cron job, so it's always up to date.

(c)	I currently have a system in place for keeping the page headers
consistent. It's probably best that I do changes to page headers at this
stage ( unless you have the patience to learn how it works ) 

(d)	When you're uploading changes, just upload the stuff you've
changed ( you can find out with something like 

find web_directory -mtime -1

-- Donovan