Web Publishing at UIC: Advanced Web Techniques

• CGI Scripts
• CSS Stylesheets -- Dynamic Selection
• Default URLs
• FormMail - Version 2.01
• Imagemaps
• Link Checkers
• PDF Files
• Ph and Phonebook Lookup
• Redirect URLs
• Resume Database Script - Maintain a Group of Documents
• SearchUIC - Search Engine for Your Web Pages
• Security and Bluestem
• Server Side Includes
• Web Aliases, CNAMEs, and Short URLs
• Webalizer - Log Analysis
• Weblint

Mostly, you don't need to write your own CGI scripts. We supply popular ones, such as FormMail for sending email, and searchUIC for conducting searches. And we can set up bluestem for password security on specific directories. However, we do now allow user-written CGI scripts to run, under certain limited circumstances.
Details on CGI Scripts

This utility lets an end-user select one of serveral CSS stylesheets, to apply to all the HTML files on your site. Users can change the look-and-feel, based on your stylesheets, in a single click. Particularly useful for users with disabilities.
Details on Dynamic CSS Stylesheets

If you don't specify a file name in a URL, the servers will search for the files index.html, index.htm , index.asis or index.cgi and use the first one found. Publishing a URL that uses a default filename has two advantages:

1. The URL is a little shorter.
2. If you decide to move your page later, you can change index.html to index.asis and automatically redirect your users.

For a query form, do something like this:

<form action="http:/www.uic.edu/htbin/ph.pl" method=post>
Netid: <input type=text name=netid>
Name: <input type=text name=name>
<form>

Would you like to create a fill-in form in html, and have the results sent back to you by email? You can do so by using the FormMail cgi script. Briefly, you create the form in the normal way, but you specify the FormMail script in the ACTION tag. You also need to create a special configuration file to tell FormMail how to process the form (i.e. where to send the mail, how to format it, etc.)
Details on FormMail.

Users can set up imagemaps, or hot maps, on their own. All you need are two files: the gif image itself, and a map file that specifies which URL you should jump to depending on which region of the image you click on. Then a small amount of html magic hooks them together.

Start with the image, for example mymap.gif. Now the hardest part is preparing a map file, because you need to specify the map regions in pixels. A program for X windows, called mapedit makes this process fairly straightforward. Mapedit is installed on both icarus and tigger. There is also a windows version available on the net. Mapedit brings up the image in a window, lets you define the various rectangles, circles, or polygons by point-and-click, and then associate them with the proper URLs. Be sure to use NCSA format for the map file, and be sure to specify absolute URLs. The documentation for mapedit is online.

There are other interesting programs in IHipi's list of imagemap tools. Or you can choose some other tool (usually a drawing tool) that will tell you the pixel coordinates of any point you click on. But whatever tool you use, you must create a map file that defines the various rectangles, circles, and polygons that constitute the hot regions of the map. Be sure to use absolute URLs, rather than relative ones, in describing which point to jump to when the map is clicked.

Assume the map file is called mymap.map, and that it and the gif file are both in your ~netid/public_html directory. (It's important that the map file end in .map.) Then in your html file, you include the map like this:

<a href="http://www.uic.edu/~netid/mymap.map">
<img ismap src="http://www.uic.edu/~netid/mymap.gif"> </a>

If you need any more details or advice, please consult the tutorial from ncsa. (The apache server includes handling of imagemaps, so you need not refer explicitly to an imagemap cgi script.)

Check all your html files in a given directory for broken links. We have both linklint and checklink available.

You can check a single file (using linklint) with this Web form

You can run either one from the command line on tigger or icarus:

PDF, or Portable Document Format, is one way to guarantee that the Web user sees your document exactly as you intended. We have a utility that can convert your existing postscript files to pdf.
Details on making PDF files

Use the ph.pl script to construct a ph query. This can be a canned query, or a form that lets the user enter his own query.

For a canned query, search for a netid this way:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/ph.pl?netid=kassem
You can use other fields, too. So to search by name, with a wildcard:
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/ph.pl?name=kassem*

Sometimes you need to send a redirection command back to the browser, either because your page has moved, or because you want to select a url from a selection list on an HTML form.
Details on how to redirect URLs

Do you have a department or student group, and want to publish a resume for each person? Perhaps you, as webmaster, want to determine the overall look-and-feel of the pages, even after the data is entered, but you also want each individual person to directly edit and update his own info at any time? (Not to mention securely, so that no individual can change someone else's file.) Try out our BioData Script:
Details on BioData Resume Database Script

Do you have a lot of Web documents that you want to let user search through? I've installed the Netscape Catalog server, and arranged for it to find and index most Web pages at UIC. Furthermore, you can build your own HTML interface to this search engine, to customize the search for your users.
Details for using the Search Engine.

Most pages are open to the public. If you truly need to limit access, perhaps for copyright reasons, you can use the bluestem system.
Details on Bluestem Security

Sometimes you want the server to include one file inside another html file before sending it to the browser. This makes it easy to embed a common header in many other files. Server-side includes make this possible.
Details on Server Side Includes

There are some limited circumstances under which we'll create a new machine name and use it to alias a Web page. This may be useful when you need to advertise your URL in print, because it gives you a short URL.
Details on Web Aliases

Webalizer is going to replace webstat. It produces much nicer reports, faster, with better information.
Details on webalizer

Check your html files for bad html. Weblint might not check for everything, but it does find common mistakes. You can check a single file with this Web form or run this command locally on tigger or icarus: