Frequently Asked Questions
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User Names and Password for Virtual Campus
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A PowerPoint Presentation of developing a web
page
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Step-by-Step guide to develop a web page in athena
HTML Basics
Tags
Relative URL
More Information( reference)
Tools for Web Authoring
Create a homepage
Get an Athena Account
Access your Athena Locker
Make your www Directory Public
Create your Web page
Test the page with your browser
Upload your HTML to athena account: FTP step-by-step
Test the remote file with your browser.
Register your page with MIT, Sloan and 15.963
User Names and Password for Virtual Campus
For all Sloan students who bid for a course last semester, User Name
is almost always a student's last name. There are 3 exceptions:
1. If a student's last name contains an apostrophe, the apostrophe has
been removed. For example, Joe O'Mera would use the User Name: Omera
2. If there are duplicate last names, the student's User Name is of
the form: firstname lastname For example, User Name might be Anne Jones
or Barbara Jones or John Jones if there is more than one person with the
same last name.
3. Some students have a last name consisting of two words. Both
words are used in the system with a space between them. For example, Anne
Del Rio would log in as User Name: Del Rio
Passwords for Sloan students are the same as what was used for the bidding
system. Since Bidding and Virtual Campus are two separate systems, if
students change their bidding system password, the Virtual Campus password
will not change unless the student specifically changes it.
As for the non-Sloan students, send me email at louyang@mit.edu
or talk to me after class.
Change password: When you login by
selecting Password Administration from the
first horizontal menu you see.
HTML Basics
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a text-based language which contains
special "tags" which describe the formatting of a page. For example, some
tags indicate that whatever is contained between should be in a particular
font. Other tags describe the position and location of an image file, and
other tags spell out the address of other documents which can be linked
to text in your document (this is known as "hypertext").
For an illustration of HTML code, you can view the source code for any
webpage. Viewing the source code for a page is very easy. All you need
to do is display the page on your browser, then go to the Netscape "View"
Menu and select "Source..." The machine will then download and display
the HTML source code in a text editor. Try this now with this page. You
can also save the source to a local file and modify it as necessary to
include you own content.
Tags
Most of the web authoring tools relives us from contacting tags directly.
However, to be able to read the source code of a web page, you should have
basic understanding of tags.
The HTML text between the "<" and ">" are called "tags", and these
are formatting commands which are interpreted by www browser when it reads
and displays the HTML code. For instance,
The source code <A HREF="http://web.mit.edu">MIT</A>will
be interpreted as MIT
Relative URLs
A relative URL is a bit of a URL that is needed to identify a document
on the web given a certain context. We don't need to specify the whole
URL so that ,whenver you move the files in the same directory to another
one, you don't need to update every URL in your HTML file.
Task: Current woprking directory is in http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www.
I want to refer to test2.html in the same directory, i.e., full
URL of the document is http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/test2.html.
I also want to refer to 1.gif in the GIF subdirectory http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/GIF/1.gif
Answer:
The context for converting the relative URL into a full one is the
full URL of this document, which contains the relative reference. Since
the currently directory is http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www, I can
leave out the parts the two have in common. The relative URL for http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/test2.html
is justtest2.html . If this document referred to a document
as GIF/1.gif then that would resolve to the full URL http://web.mit.edu/ecom/www/GIF/1.gif
More Information ( Reference)
Check out the site to learn more about HTML.
Once you have an understanding of HTML syntax, you might want to take a
look at our list of HTML
graphics resources for inspiration.
Tools for Web Authoring
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Freeware: Netscape Gold in Sloan PC lab rovides
WYSIWYG editing capabiltiies.
To access from athena, type
add outland
netscape-gold&
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Freeware: Microsoft Office 97 provides utilities to generate HTML page for Word,
Excel and Powerpoint. Download Microsoft
Internet Assistant to generate www pages from Word, Powerpoint and
Excel files if you don't use Office 97.
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Miscrosoft Frontpage 98 is an excellent web authoring package. It is
suggested for serious user.
Creating your Home Page
This section will walk you through the process of creating a web page on
the Athena server. All you need to do is to follow the steps below.
Get an Athena Account
If your email address is something like "UserName@mit.edu" you probably
already have an Athena Account, and may proceed to step 2.
As a registered MIT student, you are entitled to personal "locker" space
on Athena, where you can store your home page so that it is publicly accessable.
To arrange to get an Athena Account, contact Athena
User Accounts. If you have a valid MIT student ID number, you may also
register yourself for an account at any of the Athena workstation "clusters"
on campus. There is an Athena Cluster in the basement of Building E51.
Access your Athena Locker
To do this, you must use a program called "TelNet" to first connect to
Athena, and then to create a www folder and allow public access to it.
Telnet is available on all platforms:
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NCSA Telnet (MacOS)
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Host Presenter (Windows)
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TelNet (Windows 95)
Use one of these programs to "open connection" to: athena.dialup.mit.edu
Make your www Directory Public
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In order to create a homepage you need to first make a directory which
is world readable. Type:
cd
mkdir www
fs sa www system:anyuser rl
to do so. This creates a directory named www into which you will place
all file relating to your homapege. Now, within that directory, you have
to create a file (such as home.html) written in html format. It is
suggested to use ".html" as the extension for HTML documents.
Create your Web page
Use Web Authoring tools to creat a page. The easiest way to learn it
is to take a look at the source code for an existing page and compare it
with the graphical representation.
Test the page with your browser.
Startup your browser (e.g. Netscape), and choose "Open File..." from the
file menu. Select the "test.html" file you creat. Your browser should now
display the HTML page, and it should look like the following:
Tip: if you ever suspect that your browser
isn't showing you what it ought to, try reloading the page, either from
the Reload button, or from the View menu. You'll need
to reload pages whenever you make changes to an HTML or GIF file, since
some browsers cache pages for faster access. So, when in doubt, reload!
Upload your HTML to athena account: FTP step-by-step
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Option 0: Use Netscape Editor (Easiest and
suggested!):
After pressing "publish" button at Netscape editor (or composer), you
should put
ftp://express.dialup.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/firstletterofyourusername/secondletterofyourusername/yourusername/www
as FTP location and your athena username as user ID. For instance, if
the username is joeuser, you should put
ftp://express.dialup.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/o/joeuser/www
in FTP location and joeuser as user ID. For better
security, it is suggested to leave the password blank if you use a
public computer.
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Another Option: In Sloan PC lab, use Cute FTP (Windows 95) and choose athena
as ftp location
Note:
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On athena, file name case is important, so make sure you use the same combination
of lower and upper case letters whenever you name and refer to files.
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If you design your page in athena environment, skip this step
Test the remote file with your
browser.
At this point, you can start up your www browser, and click on the
"Open" button (or choose "Open location" from the "File" menu). In the
dialog, type the URL for your new file, which will most likely be:
http://web.mit.edu/~yourusername/www/test.html
Click on "OK", and you should get a page which looks the same as when you
tested the "test.html" file on your local computer, above.
If this is what you get: congratulations! You've just done !
If, however, you don't get this page, first check over all of the above
steps to see if you did everyting right.
--MIT
On-line Consultant Stocked Answer: Networks, www
--Contact louyang@mit.edu if you
still can't get the page to work.
Register your page with MIT, Sloan and 15.963
http://web.mit.edu/UserName/www
Register with MIT
Register with Sloan: Send email to Holly Grinell(jessi@mit.edu)
include your name, class and web page address
Register with 15.963: Send email to Stanley Ouyang (louyang@mit.edu)
include your name, class and web page address
Once you have registered, it will take several days before a link to
your page appears on the respective MIT, Sloan and 15.963 sites.
Comments? Questions? Contact Stanley
Ouyang