Web Page Setup at HICom

Section ShortCuts:

  1. Introduction
  2. Uploading Your Web Pages
  3. Folder and File Access Rights
  4. Your Web Page's URL
  5. Web Page Directory and index.html
  6. Web Server Errors
  7. CGI
  8. Imagemaps
  9. Web Page Security
  10. Counters
  11. FrontPage
  12. Misc. Stuff

Introduction

To set up and maintain a web page, you generally need both a PPP and a shell or FTP account. The PPP account is used to establish a modem connection from your PC to HICom.   The shell/ftp account is used to hold the web pages online for you after you have uploaded the pages from your PC.  At HICom, if you rent a PPP account, you are entitled to a shell/FTP account at no additional charge.  For security reasons, clients who use virtual domain hosting may only use an FTP account.

Uploading Your Web Pages

If you are a HICom PPP client, you upload your web to your ./public_html folder in your shell account on ftp.hicom.net .  The steps are as follows:

  1. Connect to HICom using Dial-Up Networking and your PPP account name and password.
  2. The first time you do this, set up your folder structure as follows:
    Telnet to ns.hicom.net and enter your PPP user-name and password.
    Select option 8w - Setup personal web page folder
    Logoff from ns.hicom.net (option x)
  3. Now FTP your web to your ./public_html directory from your PC.
    The FTP login userid is your PPP-username.
    The FTP password is your password.
    Make sure you upload to your public_html folder.

If you host a virtual domain at HICom, the process above is almost the same.   However, you must tell HICom staff which folder you will be using to host the web pages in, whether you need a cgi-bin, and/or Frontpage extensions set up.  Your FTP site will be ftp2.hicom.net

Folder and File Access Rights

If you are a PPP user, the folder and file access rights must be 0755  (self - read-write-execute, group - read+execute, world - read+execute).  From your telnet session, this can be checked as follows:

Select option 9 from the menu
Type:  ls -l public_html
Type: exit

If you have a virtual domain, the folder and file access rights must be 0775 (self and group read-write-execute, world - read+execute)

 

Your Web Page's URL

To access your web pages, the URL's is:  http://www.hicom.net/~ppp-userid/

If HICom hosts your virtual domain, the URL is http://www.domain.com

 

Web Page Directory and index.html

When a browser visits your web page, the default web page which gets loaded is called "index.html". Note that the file name is all lower-case. Also be aware that certain web-creation software tend to create the first page as "default.htm". or "index.htm"

Web Server Errors

You can check for errors generated from your web pages via the following URL's.   Serach for your user-id or a date/time stamp

  1. For PPP-only accounts.
  2. For Virtual domains

CGI

If you use cgi scripts, they must be in a subdirectory named ./cgi-bin which must have world permissions r-x. The scripts themselves must also have world permissions r-x. Before using them we must set up a ScriptAlias. The convention used for the public name of your cgi subdirectory is /cgi-userid/. The usage is http://www.hicom.net/cgi-userid/. The ScriptAlias points to your ./cgi-bin directory.

  Example:
The login name is:			qqq
The public_html actual name is:		/home/user/qqq/public_html
The cgi directory actual name is: 	/home/user/qqq/cgi-bin
The cgi useage is:			http://www.domain.com/cgi-qqq

For PPP users, the actual name "cgi-bin" is reserved for the system. The real directory for it is /var/apache/cgi-bin.  For virtual domains, the name "cgi-bin" may be mapped to a directory of your choice.

If you use Perl to write cgi scripts, make sure that the first line in the program is:   (Perl 5 is supported)

#!/usr/bin/perl

And the second line is totally blank (not # followed by nothing, TOTALLy blank).

Imagemaps

We use Apache, a derivative of the NCSA web server. Do not put parenthesis around coordinates.

Web Page Security

Web page security is supported via the .htaccess file in the subdirectory which you want to protect. Make sure it's world permissions are r-x. If you use password or group files, they must also have world permissions r-x. The command to check permission is "ls -la .htaccess".

The command htpasswd (from NCSA) is located in your path for shell accounts.

Counters

As far as I can determine, there are now four (4) ways to implement counters on a web page.  Counters allow you to count how ofter someone visits a web page.   Multiple counters may exist for a web.  Counters do not need to display what they count (i.e. they can be hidden.)

Breaking Up a Page
You design a page, code the HTML, determine where the counter should go, and then divide the page into the "front" part and the "back" part, displaying the counter value in between. This method requires some programming.
Log Based
You run a program which extracts hits to your page from the web site's activity log. HICom clears the activity logs daily, so your program would need to save the counter someplace to assure the value does not get reset when the logs get cleared.
IMG SRC Method
This method is the recommended approach at HICom and the following example shows how to set up the HTML statement. It does not require programming. The two down-sides are that the counter will not be displayed via text-based browsers (such as lynx) and that the files which contain the counter values are all in one place, publicly accessible.

The following counter is implemented with many thanks from: http://www.fccc.edu/users/muquit/ Please check this reference for detailed description of formats and other options.

The calling sequence at HICom is:

<img src="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=juergen.dat&dd=B&ft=2&md=5" align=absmiddle>
           |       |         |              |----|----|--Format options
           |       |         |---------------------------counter file
           |       |-------------------------------------Counter program
           |---------------------------------------------system library

Convention: The data file/counter file at HICom starts with your user-id.

FronPage Counter
Use MS/Frontpage extension to handle the counters.

FrontPage

FrontPage is a product from Microsoft. There are two components to it, the client side (your PC) and the server side (my web server).

The philosphy of FrontPage is that the web page structure should be reflected in the directory/folder structure that's used to store the pages. To implement that, the directory that contains the main page (index.html) will be the top directory(./public_html in our case), and pages that are linked to the main page will be in sub-directories from the main, top directory. For web pages that consist of several hierarchical pages, the directory structure can be complex. When you generate a web on your PC and upload it, the directory structure for the web on your PC will be replicated on my server.

HICom supports the Frontpage server extensions for virtual web clients.    (This site is created with Frontpage.) We are at V4.0, which comes with Frontpage 2000.   Please check the Microsoft web site for details http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/frontpage. HICom will support the frontpage extensions for user-webs (http://www.hicom.net/~username) shortly.  Please contact HICom if you need to set up Frontpage author and/or administrator ID's.  In addition to using FTP, Frontpage allows you to upload and administer web sites using a http "put" protocol.

FP2000 Note - FrontPage 2000 assumes that file names (and hyperlinks) are case-insensitive -- on a Unix system they are not.  See Microsoft Knowledgebase article q219192.  The resolution is to convert all file names to lower-case using a macro (supplied in the article).  This works fine but watch out for Java applet names ("hover buttons", f.e.) which can be referenced in a couple of ways.

Misc. Stuff

Server-Side-Includes are enabled. The file suffix is ".shtml".

The ~ key is usually to the left of the "1" key on the keyboard.

The End

Last updated Sunday, May 21, 2000 by Jürgen (admin@hicom.net)

  

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Last modified: Wednesday, May 28, 2003