Department of Engineering

IT Services

Web sites for research groups and projects

There are four ways for research groups and projects to set up and maintain their own web pages within the Department:

  1. Have the pages hosted on the Department's 'Group Web Server', www-g.eng.cam.ac.uk. (This is the recommended option.) The server is maintained centrally, so all that the research group needs to do is to edit the pages. One or more members of the group can be given access to do this. If you would like to do this, please read the information on group web pages and then contact the helpdesk
  2. Run a Web server on a Unix system belonging to the research group. This is really suitable only for large groups with their own computing support and has been adopted by, for example, the MI group (http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/).
  3. Have a single member of the group maintain the group's home page in their personal web directory on the Teaching System (accessed as http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/...) Other pages could be contained in other members' personal web directories. Although this is simple to set up, and may be useful for initial testing within your group, it is strongly discouraged as a permanent solution, for example because of problems caused when group members leave the Department.
  4. The University offer a University Computing Service Managed Web Service (MWS) which offers PHP and mysql. Also look at the Falcon service and the Managed Wiki Service.

Falcon

When creating a Falcon site there's a small amount of interaction needed with the central IT Services in the Department on a couple of points

  • The UIS will want you to give them a role-based e-mail address that will act as their contact point for the Falcon site. If you've already got a suitable address, just use that. But otherwise, you can request a new one from postmaster-query@eng.cam.ac.uk
  • The hostname for the site will be within eng.cam.ac.uk, which is managed by IT Services here. A new name needs to checked (basically to make sure there are no actual or potential clashes) - just e-mail ip-register@eng.cam.ac.uk. If it's an existing name that you're going to re-use, and the new site will completely replace the old one, there's no need to check the name. Either way, when you're ready for the site to go live, we'll configure the DNS record for the name so that it points to the new Falcon site. (With Falcon sites, you always do the initial development work at a temporary URL.)

The UIS will ask for both an e-mail address and a hostname when you first request the new site, but they'll generally let you sort them out in parallel with doing the site development, and will only insist on having them when you're ready to go live.

Producing material for the WWW provides general information about producing web pages.