Tips for CUED admin staff using the World Wide Web

Searching

• Finding other people's email addresses
  • Email addresses within the Engineering department
  • Cambridge University e-mail directory and cam.ac.uk. mail - also tells you how to register yourself with this directory.
  • Finding people's email address - general techniques applicable to addresses in many places. There's no reliable way to find the e-mail address of anyone in the world. Three options are The Internet Address Finder, Four11 Directory Services, and Bigfoot.
  • Finding people's email address - details for some Universities.
• Finding Information - Use Altavista to search using keywords. Use Yahoo (UKplus is a UK version) to browse by subject.

Writing HTML files

• Is it easy?
  Very. And "publishing" the file on the WWW is easy too. The simplest way is to log into the Teaching System, create a folder called public_html, and put a text file there. As long as that file can be read by others, it's on the Web! If you call the file "test" and your computer ID is "user", then the URL of the file is "http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~user/test". If the file contains just the word "hello", that's what you'll see online. If the file contains just the text "<B>hello</B>", the word will appear in bold text. See Producing WWW files for details of how to make headings, use italics, etc. See home page creation document for how to let others read (but not modify) the file.

  If you don't want to log into the Teaching System, see the Creating your first World Wide Web page

• What help and courses are online?
  Many documents and courses are available from our Producing material for the WWW page. In addition NetSkills supply various courses free to the UK Higher Education community.
• What editors are available at CUED for PCs and Macs?
  Netscape Gold includes an editor - it's very easy to use, especially for new text. We are going to be supporting one of the Mac/PC WYSIWYG editors soon. A trial version of Claris Home Page for Windows 95 is available from Michael Gray. You could also try Word if you have Internet Assistant installed. CUED's page on Producing material for the WWW should contain the latest information on getting these editors. Mail Michael Gray or pc-support for help.
• Is there a particular style that I should use for CUED documents?
  The CUED WWW House Style provides guidelines. The University's House Style Guidelines are also online.
• Should I produce a single big HTML file or break it up into pieces and link them together?
  Some factors to bear in might when deciding how much to break the doc into files include
  • Maintainance - especially if you're going to produce paper and WWW docs from the same source, a single file might be easier to maintain. On the other hand, if the sections were going to be maintained by various people it would be best for each section to be in a separate file.
  • Re-use - If there's a chance that a section of a doc might be referred to from various other pages, then the section might best be in a separate file.
  • Logging - A record is kept of how many times each file is accessed, so if you want to know how much a particular piece of text is being read, put it in a file by itself.
  • Speed - It's quicker to access a short index and then select a file than to wait for a whole big file to load in, so if the doc is big, reverting to a multi-file structure would make access fast for those only interested in particular sections.
• My pages look great when I look at them using Netscape, but someone's just told me that they look a mess. What's going on?
  Various programs (browsers) exist to view HTML files. Most people use Netscape, but some aren't allowed to (by virtue of Nationality) so we have installed Mosaic and lynx (a text-only browser).

  To be fair to our students from (e.g.) Cuba and at text-only terminals it's a good idea to check how HTML files look with Mosaic and lynx. You can run lynx by telnetting into the teaching system and typing "lynx the_URL". You should be able to use the TAB and Enter keys (maybe the cursor keys too) to get around. Supporting the different browsers is a pain. You could try keeping the HTML simple (in particular, don't use tables or frames) so that all the browsers can cope. The disadvantage is that the pages look worse with Netscape than they need to.

Some things worth knowing about MS Word

• Styles - Suppose all subsection headings need to be centred, bold 14pt. How do you do this? You could go through the doc, finding all the subsection headings and changing them to be centred, bold 14pt. Alternatively, you could create a subsection heading style and set all the subsection headings to that style. The advantages are that
  • if you have to change the style of the subsection headings again, you just have to change the style, not all the subheadings.
  • If you need to convert the document to another format, the converter will be able to do a much better job.
• Templates/Stationery and master pages - If you're writing the same kind of document over and over again, experiment with templates. A collection of common templates might usefully be shared amongst secretaries - the template looks after appearance so you can look after content.

• Save As ... - Word can save files in many formats. Find out which formats you have available. If you've written HTML codes directly, you'll need to save as text but with ".htm" (rather than ".txt") extension.

  If Internet Assistant (IA) is installed, you may be able to Save As ... HTML directly. IA also changes the menus so that you have some extra WWW options. IA is a free add-on for Word available from Microsoft. Note that Word 7 with IA 2.0z is a lot better than Word 6 and IA 1.0. Upgrade if you can.

  Note also that Word doesn't always produce superb HTML files - check them!

• Using an export filter - If you use a suitable template with styles, then routine documents (minutes, schedules, etc) can be tidily converted into HTML. Contact pc-support@eng or mac-support@eng for details on what's available. Possibilities include HotMeTaL Pro 6 (available from Computer Service Sales), HTML Tidy, etc.

Glossary of Internet Terminology

People who can help

Mail admin-support@eng.cam.ac.uk if you want help on other computing-related aspects. Rosalie Orriss can provide a secretary's perspective.

If you have any suggestions for additions to this page, mail Tim Love