Personal Web Pages in the
ISU Mathematics Department
Fritz Keinert
September 2007

Web pages are a fact of modern life, especially professional life. The Math Department maintains a web page with contact information for everyone in the department, and encourages everyone to maintain more detailed personal pages. The personal pages should include a home page about yourself, with information such as office hours and teaching assignments, and a home page for every course you teach.

This document gives a brief overview of how to create and maintain these personal pages.

Outline

• Glossary
• Your Departmental Page
• Your Personal Page(s)
  • Overview
  • Finding A Server
  • HTML
  • HTML Editors
• Hands-on Practice
• Dos and Don'ts

Glossary

Netid

That is an ISU term. To do anything on ISU computers, you need a netid, otherwise known as your user name. Mine is keinert. My files are located in directory /home/keinert/ (on a Unix system), my email address is keinert@iastate.edu.

If you don't have a netid yet, go to the ISU Acropolis site at https://asw.iastate.edu/ and click on Register. If you are not sure whether you have a netid or not, look in the online address book and see if you have an email address or not.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator, otherwise known as a web address, such as http://www.math.iastate.edu/.

Hypertext

Text with embedded links that can take you to a different place in the text, or a different document altogether. The basic idea goes back to 1935 (never implemented, based on some sort of mechanical automatic microfilm fetcher). The first implementations date back to the 1960s, but they were never widely used until Tim Berners-Lee at CERN invented the world-wide web in 1990.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language, the language in which web pages are written. This is explained more below.

HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is the protocol that computers use to deliver web pages. A protocol is a specific way of exchanging information for a specific purpose, such as the email protocol, the file transfer protocol (FTP), the telnet protocol, etc.

Your Departmental Page

The Math Department maintains a basic web page for everybody in the Department. Go to the Math Department home page http://www.math.iastate.edu/ and click your way down to People -> Faculty -> (individual) or People -> Graduate Students -> (individual).

Most of the information on the departmental page will stay the same from semester to semester. It is enough if you proofread it once a year, at the beginning of Fall Term, and notify Sue Ellen Tuttle if there are any changes.

Your Personal Web Page(s)

It is recommended that you maintain a personal home page, and a course web page for every course you teach. In this section I will explain where you can put your web pages, and what tools are available tools for creating and maintaining them.

After you have created a personal home page or course home page, let Sue Ellen Tuttle know about it, so it can be linked into the departmental web site.

Overview

Web pages are kept on a server. A server is a computer which stores web pages and sends them out to people who request them (the clients).

The servers available at ISU are

• The Math Department server orion.math.iastate.edu (for faculty only)
• The WebCT server webct.its.iastate.edu (for faculty and TAs with classes in WebCT)
• The ISU server www.public.iastate.edu (for faculty and graduate students)

To create a web site, you have to get access to one of these servers. That will be covered in the next subsection.

Web pages are written in a language called HTML. It is human readable, and you can edit it directly, but it is much easier to use one of the many web editors available nowadays. This will also be covered in the following subsections.

It is customary to build or edit the web site on your local computer until you are satisfied with it, and then to publish (upload) the completed pages to the server. It depends on the server how you do the publishing. For most web sites it is done by FTP, but for all the ISU servers it can be done by mounting the server directory as a network drive on your PC and simply copying the files over.

Finding A Server

Math Department Server

This is only for faculty members. Tell Jon Roden that you want space on orion.math.iastate.edu. He can set it up so that you can mount your web space as a network drive on your office computer. Let's assume that Jon has set it up so that your web site is mapped to drive W on your Windows machine.

If your user name is keinert and you build a web page called math165.html, the full path name of that page on orion is /var/www/html/keinert/math165.html. Drive W will be mapped to /var/www/html/keinert/, so on your machine the file will be W:\math165.html. On the web, the address of this page is http://orion.math.iastate.edu/keinert/math165.html or http://www.math.iastate.edu/keinert/math165.html.

The default name for a home page is index.html. If you call your page index.html, you can refer to it as simply http://orion.math.iastate.edu/keinert/. The name homepage.html will also work.

WebCT Server

This is not for beginners. You request a WebCT course through online forms accessible from the WebCT front page. Mostly you will be dealing with tools internal to WebCT for setting up and managing your class, but there is a place for your own web pages in WebCT. The easiest way to publish files to WebCT is to use WebDAV. You set up your WebCT file space as a network drive on your local computer, and copy files across. Ask someone for help in setting this up.

A web site in WebCT is really only useful for use in teaching a class. Only the students in your class will be able to see it.

ISU Server

Every ISU netid comes with a quota of personal disk space; I think it is 1 GB currently. You can use some of that for your web space. Your web directory has to be called WWW (in upper case), located in your home directory. If your user name is keinert and you want to create a web page called math165.html, the full pathname of this page on a Unix system is /home/keinert/WWW/math165.html, or equivalently ~/WWW/math165.html. On a Windows machine, your personal file system will be mounted as a network drive accessible through My Computer. Let's assume that you have mounted your personal file system as drive P. In that case, the web page would be at P:\WWW\math165.html. The address of this file on the web is http://www.public.iastate.edu/~keinert/math165.html. Note the tilde before your user name.

The default name for a web page is index.html. If you call your page index.html, you can refer to it as simply http://www.public.iastate.edu/~keinert/. The name homepage.html will also work.

Before the files in your WWW directory are available on the web, you have to tell the system about it. Information on how to do that can be found at http://www.iastate.edu/guide/build/overview.shtml. That document has a lot of information you don't need, about building departmental pages and so on. Here is the relevant information from this document: To register a web site:

• Sign on to Acropolis, which is http://asw.iastate.edu/, using your netid.
• Click on "Manage User."
• Click "View/edit your personal web page settings."
• Click "Register web page" and follow instructions.

This will create the directory WWW if it does not exist already. You can delete your registration by following the same steps and clicking "unregister web page." After you unregister your web page, the files will still be there, but they will be your private files, not visible to anybody else.

Neither registering nor unregistering will hurt the files in WWW. It simply tells the system whether you want the files in WWW to be publicly visible or not.

HTML

Web pages are written in plain text, with markup. Markup consists of formatting commands added to the text. The two markup languages you should be familiar with as a mathematician are TeX and HTML (HyperText Markup Language). You need to know a lot about TeX, and just enough about HTML to be able to diagnose mistakes that your HTML editor cannot fix.

Markup in TeX usually looks like either \begin{format} ... \end{format} or \format{...}, and of course $ ... $ for math.

Markup in HTML looks mostly like <tag> ... </tag>, except for a few single tags of the form <tag />. An example for the begin-end markup in HTML is <b>bold text</b>. An example for the single markup tag is <br /> (line break) or <img src="my_face.jpg" /> (insert an image).

There are really two different kinds of markup: physical markup and logical markup. Physical markup is something like "center this text and make it boldface". Logical markup is something like "this is a level 2 heading", and then a separate style file contains the definition of a level 2 heading ("centered and in boldface"). With logical markup you can change the look and feel of a document dramatically with just a few changes, and the presentation is consistent: all level 2 headings look the same. Logical markup also lays out the logical structure of your document to a computer program; marking the section headings allows TeX to produce a table of contents, for example.

You are probably familiar with the concept of a style file from LaTeX. Plain TeX uses physical markup. LaTeX uses logical markup and style files.

HTML is a mixture of physical markup and logical markup. It took the developers a few years to realize that, and to start encouraging everyone to use logical markup only. The physical markup tags of HTML are now officially declared as deprecated (what does that mean?). Of course there are billions of pages with physical markup out there, so it will never go away. If you are going to do a lot of web site editing, you should learn about HTML style files. They are called Cascading Style Sheets and are stored in files with a .css extension. If you just want to build a simple page for a class, you don't need that.

For a dramatic demonstration on what is possible with style sheets, look at http://www.csszengarden.com/.

HTML Editors

It is possible to write web pages with a plain text editor, but an HTML editor is highly recommended. Here are some of your choices:

• Dreamweaver. This is the state of the art as far as I am concerned. Even the cheap educational version costs $200, however. Dreamweaver was written by a company called Macromedia, also responsible for Flash, but they were bought by Adobe. Look for it on http://www.adobe.com/.
• Microsoft Frontpage. This was Microsoft's first web editing product. I have never used it, but I have seen the HTML code it produces, which is absolutely horrible. The files are at least twice as long as clean HTML code produced by Dreamweaver and other programs, they contain a bunch of complicated constructions that might not work in non-IE browsers, and they are unreadable for a human. I plan to keep avoiding this program like the plague. Even Microsoft gave up on it in the meantime .
• Write the page in Microsoft Word or Publisher or Excel or any other Microsoft product, and save it as a web page. Same comments as for Frontpage, except I have used this feature occasionally to publish a spreadsheet with scores.
  To quote from a Dreamweaver book I have: "From Word, you can save any document as a web page, essentially turning a Word doc into HTML. The drawback to this method is that Word produces hideous HTML code. One look at it, and you'd think that your cat fell asleep on the keyboard."
  I haven't tried this in Word 2007 yet. Maybe they have gotten better.
• Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express. This is part of a larger package for programmers called Visual Studio. The scaled-down version Visual Studio Express edition is free, at http://msdn.com/express. This program is getting good reviews, but is more aimed at commercial developers who want interactive web sites that communicate with data bases. It also requires that both the server and the user use Microsoft products. It is not really suited to our requirements.
• Some web browsers have built-in editors, or at least they used to have them. Check your web browser documentation. The only one I have come across recently is Mozilla Composer, available at http://www.mozilla.org. I haven't tried it.
• Nvu is a free HTML editor that has at least 90% of the features of Dreamweaver for simple websites, and a similar interface. It has some bugs, and some of the code it generates looks a bit strange, but I found it quite usable. As they say on Netlib: Caveat Emptor. Anything Free Comes With No Guarantee. This program is my top recommendation for simple jobs. It is available for free at http://www.nvu.com/, and already installed on many machines in the Math Department.

nVu is now an "orphan" software project. A user-community maintained
program called "KompoZer" has branched off from the nVu project.

Details about KompoZer can be found online here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KompoZer

http://kompozer.net/

I use a copy of KompoZer for some HTML editing projects.

Hands-On Practice

Let's build two simple web pages using Nvu, a home page and a course page. The text that goes into the pages is shown below. If you are following along with the talk, you can cut and paste the text into Nvu.

The course page is supposed to contain this information:

The home page is supposed to contain the following information, plus a picture:

We will add the formatting and a few hot links to these pages.

As I mentioned before, you are really supposed to build the pages in a separate place and publish them later. For simplicity, I will build them directly in my WWW directory. This solves another problem, namely the fact that Nvu is severely braindamaged when it comes to the publishing process.

Here are the basic steps:

1. Start up Nvu, create a blank page. Cut and paste the text from the first box into it, and save it as file math414.html.
2. Do the same thing with the second page. Call it index.html. You can have both files open at the same time.
3. Add the formatting and links, title, etc. to both files, and save again.
4. Call up your web pages in a browser and see if they work. Go back to step 3 if needed.
5. Publish your web pages. Normally that would involve copying the files to your web site. In this case, we go to Acropolis and make the pages visible.

Dos and Don'ts

Dos

• Do label every picture (for blind people with screen readers). Modern HTML editors enforce that.
• Do tell Sue Ellen about your page when you are done, so it can be linked into the departmental page.
• Do keep your pages updated, at least once per semester.

Don'ts

• Don't use a screen background that makes the text hard to read.
• Don't use animation unless it has a clear purpose. No scrolling marquees, no blinking text, no flashing lights, etc. Especially, don't put in any violently flashing graphics that can induce epileptic fits in some people.
• Don't put in clickable links that are graphics only. Use text for links, or at least enter some alternative text for the graphic. The worst abuse of this is to have a single big graphic, where clicking on different locations gets you to different places.
• Don't use nonstandard links. If it is blue and underlined, it should be a clickable link, and vice versa. You can get away with slightly different colors, but it should always be obvious what is a link and what is not a link.

Here are some pages I consider seriously bad:

• Here is a terrible page from Worst of the Web, August 23, 2007: http://www.accordeons-hamelrijk.com/ (again, here is a local copy).
• My niece went to Christopher Newport University in Virginia, so I took a look at their Math Department. Here is one page I found: http://www.pcs.cnu.edu/~gweber/ . That page loads very slowly, so I made a local copy.