Content:CS Dept Site Setup
Both versions of the department's website run off Quark.
Contents
Staging
The staging server can be accessed at staging.cs.earlham.edu. This contains a copy of everything on the website and everything that's currently being worked on. We'll use this as a place to make changes before we commit them to going live. Note: This is the only place that you should make changes to the website!!
The files for the staging site are located on quark at /clients/www/staging/html and /clients/www/staging/cgi-bin.
To access staging from a web browser, go to http://staging.cs.earlham.edu/ You'll be prompted for the group's username and password. If you've forgotten these or haven't gotten them yet, talk to one of the other content group members.
Live
After we've reviewed changes to a page or to a project, we can copy them over to the live website by using rsync. This can be either just files or entire directories. Immediately after, commit the changes to the CVS tree by running
cvs commit
from inside the html directory.
The files for the live website are located on quark at /clients/www/html and /clients/www/html/cgi-bin/.
Cruft
There's a lot of currently unused stuff in /clients/www and also in the html directory. Some of this is currently part of CVS. Eventually we should move over to SVN and only put in there stuff that's actually used.
- Content CVS Directories - a breakdown of the directories and what's in them
Accessing Quark from Home
Shell Access
You can get remote access to a command line on quark remotely using SSH. If you're running Mac OS X or Linux, you already have a built-in shell that you can use. For Windows, you'll need to download Putty:
You don't need to install it: it's entirely a self-contained .exe file. Enter quark.cs.earlham.edu for the hostname. Use your ACL username and password.
Transferring Files
You can transfer files back and forth from Quark using SCP (a file transfer protocol that runs over SSH). Download WinSCP:
http://winscp.net/eng/download.php
Changing the News Section
You update the news blog --- just add a new entry and mark it for publication when you save it --- and then rebuild the blog. The second part is the part that is most easily missed. You have to select rebuild from the menu on the left side of the blog page and then something like "rebuild all" from the pop-up. There is a cron script that runs every five minutes or so which checks to see if the rss file, which will be updated when you rebuild the blog, has been modified more recently than the html include file and regenerates the html if it has. So there will generally be a delay between the rebuild of the blog and the update showing up in the web.
The jobs blog works the same way.
The cron job is
/clients/www/html/cgi-bin/feed2page.pl -f /clients/www/html/cgi-bin/feeds.list
feeds.list has the format, one per line:
<filename.rdf>|<filename.html>
where <filename.rdf> is the pathname of the the rss file and <filename.html> is the pathname of the html include file.
