For official web pages, we recommend that you use a "virtual host". Suppose you are creating web pages for the Department of Web Science. The first step is to request a departmental account. Suppose the name of this account is websci. (Account names are limited to 8 characters.) At this point, your web area would have a name like http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~websci.

Names like that are hard for users to remember. It's better to allocate your own name, e.g. http://webscience.rutgers.edu. This is called a "virtual host", because it looks like it's a separate computer (i.e. "host"). But in fact it's just a special way of accessing your web area on RCI or some other OIT server. That is, internally http://webscience.rutgers.edu simply refers to http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~websci.

To allocate a virtual hostname, send email, telling the staff what virtual hostname you want, and what departmental account it should refer to. Normally the virtual hostname will point to the public_html directory in this account. If that's not what you want, be sure to mention it. The mail should be sent to:

• RCI (New Brunswick): help@rci.rutgers.edu
• Andromeda (Newark): help@andromeda.rutgers.edu
• WWW.Camden (Camden): help@camden.rutgers.edu

Note that virtual host names are not limited to 8 characters, as account names are. Your virtual host name can be completely different from the name of the departmental account it points to.

There is some overhead to setting up and maintaining virtual hosts. Normally they are allocated only for official purposes, such as departments or major, continuing projects.

The Microcomputer Support Services Group in New Brunswick runs a Windows NT server that departments can use for web pages. This is intended primarily for departments that want to pay MSSG to develop and maintain web pages. However if a department wants to use Microsoft tools, and doesn't want to run its own web pages, we can arrange for access to this system. The system has the usual Microsoft tools, such as the Microsoft Frontpage Extensions, Visual Basic, and Access.

For information, contact Frank Reda, reda@nbcs.rutgers.edu.

Camden runs a NT server, camden-nt1.rutgers.edu, for use by departments at Camden. It has the Microsoft Frontpage extensions available, but not Visual Basic or Access. it is available for faculty staff only. Information is available through the Camden help system.

New Brunswick student organizations can get accounts that allow them to put organizational web pages on the Eden web server. See Student Organization Accounts in NB.

Newark does support student group web pages on pegasus (the Newark student system). Contact help@pegasus.rutgers.edu for more information.

Camden student groups may get web pages on a student-run computer system. Contact help@clam.rutgers.edu for more information.

Many departments prefer to run their own web servers. In New Brunswick, the Microcomputer Services Group (MSSG) can give you advice on setting up such a server. It is possible to pay MSSG to run a server for you. For information, contact reda@nbcs.rutgers.edu. This is intended primarily for New Brunswick users. Departments on other campuses should contact their campus director.

Departments and student organizations may wish to have your web page listed with the main Rutgers web area, http://www.rutgers.edu. To do so take a look at the page "About This Site". You'll find references to policies and procedures. One of them is the Request for Placement form. Use this form to ask for a pointer from www.rutgers.edu to your web page.

The Rutgers home page has a link to a generalized search tool. This search tool is built automatically by a program that attempts to find all web pages at Rutgers. This program is provided by Google.

You can add a search option to your web page that supports the following options:

Searching all of Rutgers

<form name=gs method=GET action=http://www.google.com/u/rutgerz>
<input type=hidden name=hl value="en">
<input type=hidden name=lr value="">
<input type=hidden name=ie value="ISO-8859-1">
<input type=text name=q size=31 maxlength=2048 value="">
<font size=-1> <input type=submit name="btnG" value="Search">
<input type="reset" name="Reset32" value="Clear">
</form>

Limit a search to a specific host (e.g. www.eden) the "i" is for include

<form name=gs method=GET action=http://www.google.com/u/rutgerz>
<input type=hidden name=hl value="en">
<input type=hidden name=lr value="">
<input type='hidden' name='as_dt' value='i'/>
<input type='hidden' name='as_sitesearch'value='www.eden.rutgers.edu'/>
<input type=hidden name=ie value="ISO-8859-1">
<input type=text name=q size=31 maxlength=2048 value="">
<font size=-1> <input type=submit name="btnG" value="Search">
<input type="reset" name="Reset32" value="Clear">
</form>

Exclude hits from a specific host (e.g. www.eden) the "e" is for exclude

<form name=gs method=GET action=http://www.google.com/u/rutgerz>
<input type=hidden name=hl value="en">
<input type=hidden name=lr value="">
<input type='hidden' name='as_dt' value='e'/>
<input type='hidden' name='as_sitesearch'value='www.eden.rutgers.edu'/>
<input type=hidden name=ie value="ISO-8859-1">
<input type=text name=q size=31 maxlength=2048 value="">
<font size=-1> <input type=submit name="btnG" value="Search">
<input type="reset" name="Reset32" value="Clear">
</form>

The ability to specify a group of hosts for inclusion or exclusion is not supported.

For more information about the Google University Search program see the Google University Search FAQ.

Resources for creating web pages and sites

New Brunswick Computing Services has an extensive collection of resources for creating web pages. This includes documentation and example pages you can start with.

The Internet Services section of the Camden help system has information for Camden users.

The tools used most commonly at Rutgers for creating web pages are

• Netscape Composer (with Netscape 4 and later) is the most commonly used low-level tool. It comes with Netscape Communicator, so it's free. It's fairly easy to use. It is fine if you want to create one or two pages, and don't want to do anything fancy. OIT and the Teaching Excellence Center often teach this tool.
• Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe's GoLive and Microsoft FrontPage are widely used intermediate-level tools. Of these Dreamweaver is probably the most widely used. GoLive will be in some public labs because of licensing problems with Dreamweaver. GoLive is similar facilities, but Dreamweaver is slightly easier to use. Templates for the standard Rutgers "look" are available for Dreamweaver at toolkit.rutgers.edu.

In my opinion there are no tools for advanced work. Most people who do advanced work edit HTML directly, using a text editor. Or they start with one of the tools mentioned above and then tweak the resulting HTML. The main Rutgers web pages (at www.rutgers.edu) were done by hand, and could not easily be done using one of these tools.

FrontPage has one unfortunate feature: it is intended for use with a Microsoft server. Rutgers primarily uses Unix systems as web servers. In the original version of FrontPage it was hard to use FrontPage to maintain collections of pages on a Unix server. FrontPage 98 and later have mostly fixed this. It works fine as long as you keep two copies of your pages. You should keep a working copy on a Windows system (or a file server serving a set of Windows systems), where FrontPage can edit it nicely. Once you get your pages the way you like them, you can use the "Publish" command to send them to one of our Unix servers. The publish wizard will detect that the Unix server is not running Microsoft's services, and use normal FTP to upload the data.

This may seem like extra work. But in fact it really is a good idea to do things this way. It's best to do your editing on a separate working copy of your pages. That way you can try things out, and make mistakes, without having other people see the pages while you're editing them. Once you like the results, you then upload everything at once to one of our servers.

Microsoft does actually support their special features on Unix servers. However one of our staff has looked at this software, and believes that there are serious security problems with it.

If you consider the Microsoft Frontpage Extensions critical for your work, you may be able to arrange to use a OIT Window NT server. Contact Frank Reda, reda@nbcs.rutgers.edu.

Camden users can access the Frontpage Extensions on Camden's NT server.

At Camden and Newark, users may also find it convenient to make use of Samba. This software allows the OIT Unix servers to act as Microsoft file servers. Thus you can use PC tools on your desktop to edit web pages that are stored on the OIT servers and served there.

CGI, Counters, Forms, etc.

NOTE: This section describes facilities available on the OIT Unix servers. The Microcomputer Support Services Group runs a Windows NT server that departments can use for web pages. This is intended primarily for departments that want to pay MSSG to develop and maintain web pages. However if a department wants to use Microsoft tools, and doesn't want to run its own web pages, we can arrange for access to this system. The system has the usual Microsoft tools, such as the Microsoft Frontpage Extensions, Visual Basic, and Access. For information, contact Frank Reda, reda@nbcs.rutgers.edu.

OIT servers support a variety of facilities to let you prepare web pages that go beyond static text. These range from counters to facilities to do full-blown online applications.

For more complex applications, we recommend using PHP. This is a scripting language at the same level as Microsoft's Visual Basic. Like Visual Basic, it has many packages that implement common things you might want to do from a web page. PHP is supported on all of the major OIT servers. See PHP and Mysql Programming for more information.

While PHP can be used to do just about anything, we supply specific facilities to do forms and counters. If that's all you need, it may be easier to use these facilities than to write PHP. See the sections on forms and counters below.

Many users need to protect web pages so that only certain people can see them. See Password Validation for this.

While we recommend using PHP for programs, Newark and Camden also support the "CGI" interface. This allows you to execute arbitrary programs from your web page. New Brunswick does not support CGI, because of the serious security risks.

To use the CGI interface on the systems that permit it, you'll need to make sure that your program is executable, protected so that the http user can access it, and that the file name ends in .cgi. In Newark, it should be placed in a special cgi-bin subdirectory, ~/public_html/cgi-bin. In Camden it can be placed in ~/public_html or any subdirectory of that.

PHP was specifically designed for web programming. It has builtin protection against some of the most common security problems. It is very widely used for doing web services. Some very large services have been implemented using PHP.

To use PHP, you put a file in your public_html directory that ends with ".php". The web server will automatically activate the PHP interpreter. For documentation, see the PHP web site. Your OIT campus web page may have additional documentation on PHP at your site.

The PHP language allows you to write web pages that access a database. OIT supplies the Mysql database for this purpose. Mysql is a reasonably full implementation of SQL. Thus it has a certain similarity to Oracle and other commercial database products. However Mysql is far simpler. It has all the facilities one would normally need for doing web-based applications, but is missing many of the additional facilities needed for other kinds of database work. This makes it much simpler. The full Mysql documentation is available as a single web page. (See the Mysql web site.) The full Oracle documentation covers several book shelves. Learning Oracle and using it requires a very large commitment of time.

Note that the Mysql documentation assumes some familiarity with the SQL language. SQL is a standard database language, which is used by all the major commercial database systems. The Mysql web site also has some basic tutorals on SQL. You may be better off purchasing a book on SQL. Some setup by OIT staff is necessary before you can use MySQL. We recommend that you contact the help desk for your campus before committing to MySQL.

There are times when you need to restrict access to web pages. We supply four ways of doing this:

1. A file in your home directory, listing usernames and encrypted passwords. The program htpasswd is used to create and maintain this file.
2. You may check users against the list of valid users on the local system. That is, if your web page is on rci, you can specify that any rci user can look at it. The user will be asked for a username and password. They must type their rci username and password.
3. You may check users against the Rutgers-wide user database. In this case the user must type a username the same way they would type it for dialin authentication. That is, the username will look like "smith@andromeda" or "jones@rci-dilaup". The password will be the usual OIT password.
4. You may use one of the preceding two mechanisms, but restrict it to a list of users you supply. For example, you may specify that only smith and jones can use your web page. In order to identify themselves, smith or jones would have to supply their system passwords.

We believe that most of these options are available on most OIT servers. However for up to date information on the specific validation support for your server, please see your campus web pages or contact the help desk on your campus.

OIT supplies a counter service, which is available on all campuses. That is, if you want a counter on your web page, we will maintain it for you. See http://counter.rutgers.edu/counter.html for details. This reference includes an online tool for creating a counter automatically. That tool is intended for individuals who want one counter on their top-level page. Some departments may have large enough collections that they need more than one counter. If so, please send email to counter@counter.rutgers.edu, telling them how many counters you need and what they should be called.

We are in the process of replacing this with counter facilities on the local systems. See the Camden Internet Information web site for information on Camden's counter CGI. Similar facilities will be available on other campuses shortly.

New Brunswick (on rci) and Camden have some facilities for processing web forms. Now that PHP is available on all systems, you may find it easier to use PHP to implement forms than to figure out how to configure the forms processor.

The problem with forms is what to do once the user has filled out the form. The form includes an "action", specifying what to do with the data. This action executes a CGI script that puts the data into a database or processes it in some other way.

For complex forms-based applications, you'll want to write the forms action yourself. PHP is well suited for this.

For simpler forms, you can use a standard forms action that we supply. It will let you send the data collected in the form to a specified email address or put it into a file. For information on this facility

• New Brunswick (rci) type "man form" on systems where it is installed, or see this document.
• Camden: See the Formmail web page.

Web-based instructional services

In cooperation with the New Brunswick Instructional Technology Taskforce, Network Services is running WebCT, a web application intended to support coursework. This system is available for use by all campuses. The Newark campus is now using Blackboard, a similar system from another company.

WebCT is a system designed to help faculty do online course support. It has a variety of facilities to put information about the course online, to help students communicate with each other and the faculty, to keep track of student progress, etc. See WebCT: Web Course Tools for details. The Rutgers WebCT server became operational on January 16, 1998.

eCompanion is a similar system, which is also available without charge for all Rutgers faculty. This system is provided through an off-campus service provider, http://ecollege.com. Support is provided by staff from eCollege. For more information about using this service please see the eCompanion description at the Rutgers Office of Continuous Education.

Support and training for WebCT is done in New Brunswick by the Teaching Excellence Center. Their support includes both training and consulting. The New Brunswick help desk can also provide consulting and other assistance. The facility is available for faculty on all campuses.