December 21, 1998

Computer Services has purchased and installed a new faster machine for the Front Door server (www.ohiou.edu). In the process we have also upgraded the operating system and TCP/IP software. We will summarize the changes that are visible to the user here as we discover them:

• When setting VMS Mail forwarding, you must not triple the quotes before and after the destination address. Appendix II of Memo 85 has been updated to show the correct syntax. Existing VMS Mail forwarding from the server should continue to work as well or badly as it did before the change.

• When logging in for a telnet session, at the USERNAME: prompt, what you type is echoed in the case you used, rather than being forced to uppercase. No user action is needed, the login process continues to be case-insensitive.

April 24, 1998

The keyword search page (the "Find" sphere on the Front Door) now includes the option of searching all pages on the OAK server. There are nearly as many pages on OAK as on all other servers combined, so in order to conserve disk space and to speed up the search process, the OAK pages are not included in the "all pages" choice, only in their own separate choice.

The sequence of choices has been modified so that the most likely ones are listed first.

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April 8, 1998

Recent developments of interest to Ohio University Web authors include:

• With the impending retirement of ALL-IN-1, the time has come for individuals who have personal Web pages on OUVAXA to migrate them to their accounts on OAK.

  Migration instructions are available on-line.

• In order to provide shorter URLs for departments, offices, and organizations using CSCWWW as their Web server, any Web page that has been known as

  http://cscwww.cats.ohiou.edu/~whatever/

  or

  http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~whatever/

  should now be identified as

  http://www.ohiou.edu/~whatever/

  This will require the revision of all imagemap data files, and of any HTML files that have absolute URLs for links or for images. Links among your own Web pages, except in imagemap data files, should always be by relative URLs, which will not need to be changed. Mailto links should also be modified to change "www.cats.ohiou.edu" or "cscwww.cats.ohiou.edu" to "www.ohiou.edu", both in the E-mail address inside the anchor tag and also in the visible text. If, as we urge you to do, you have included the URL of the page in the visible text, perhaps in a boilerplate section at the end of the page, you should make the change there also.

  The old, longer URLs will continue to work, but a more consistent Web presence for the University will result if each Web author can update his or her pages appropriately. Computer Services staff will endeavor to include all Web pages in the keyword searchable index, no matter how they are linked. We are more confident of catching them all if the short form is used.

• Web page usage statistics are available for CSCWWW. The reports are by calendar months, and include "hit counts" for all but the least-active Web pages.

• The Campus Calendar of Events is now on-line. Data entry is in progress.

• The OAK Home Page now includes links to Web pages that link all personal Web pages on the OAK system. These new pages are being re-created every week, using far less human intervention than the previous annual update method, so that new personal Web pages are much more likely to be found promptly by the various Web search engines. By the end of April, we expect the Ohio University search engine to include all personal pages on OAK, as well.

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March 3, 1998

The generic E-mail script has been enhanced to permit the use of up to 999 fields (the limit was previously 20 fields). See Memo 85, Appendix V.

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February 12, 1998

Please review your Web pages for use of the old area code. One way to do this is to select the Front Door's "Find" choice, and search for 614. This will not find any instances where the area code appears as part of an image.

The generic E-mail script has been enhanced to permit control of the "exit link" on the response page seen after submission. See Memo 85, Appendix V.

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November 21, 1997

The essay on "Keeping Your Web Pages Robust" (Memo 85, Appendix VI) has been revised. The revisions include more links to external resources, more issues addressed, clarified wording, separation into positive and negative checklists, and a re-ordering of the items in the two checklists into approximately priority sequence.

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June 23, 1997

This initial entry highlights recent developments that may have escaped your notice:

1. A generic script is now available to support mailto forms. The features, limitations, and techniques for using that script are described on-line in Appendix 5 of Memo 85.

2. A keyword-searchable index of all Ohio University Web pages is under development. Pages from all major Web servers at the university, except for OAK, are already included. The index can be searched by using the "find" sphere on the Front Door page. A description of the method used to prepare the index, and the implications for Web page authors, is included in Appendix 4 of Memo 85.

   All Web page authors and Web server system managers are invited to experiment with the keyword searching process, and to provide feedback by E-mail to acatec@www.ohiou.edu. Please check for any of the following items:

   • Pages being found that were supposed to be private (because some public page does have a link to them).

   • Pages being listed multiple times (because different URLs are used that lead to the same page).

   • Different pages that appear to be the same (because they have the same HTML title).

   • Pages being listed by their URL (because they have no HTML title).

   • Any collections of Web pages, or indeed whole servers, that are not listed.

3. Server-side imagemaps are supported for all users' pages on CSCWWW, on OUVAXA, and on OAK. A detailed description of their use is available in Appendix 3 of Memo 85.

Dick Piccard revised this file (http://www.ohiou.edu/pagemasters/news/archives.html) on March 8, 2000.

All comments, criticisms, and suggestions for modification gratefully accepted by E-Mail to acatec@www.ohiou.edu.