Brown's central web facility is an Apache server running on a UNIX-based computer. It is available and in production seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. Users are generally expected to develop pages on their local computers, and move them, via FTP, to the central server, called webpub. (Some departments have their own web servers; contact your department head for information about non-central servers). Brown's central server supports server-side includes and .htaccess files. It does not currently support streaming media, ASP, JSP, or ColdFusion.

Please be sure to read the server announcements that are displayed upon logging into either webpub.

File-level backup on webpub is not possible, so web publishers should keep local backups of their web pages. Server-level backups are kept in the event of a major server failure.

Brown offers assistance to campus Web publishers in the following ways:

• an email community for web publishers
• documentation to help with the technical aspects of web development and maintenance
• web publishing training classes

We also support, at various levels, several web publishing tools.

An email forum (register at http://listserv.brown.edu/webpublishers.html) is available to anyone involved or interested in web publishing at Brown. Users post questions, problems, ideas, and answers. This is generally the fastest way to get assistance with web publishing questions.

Training

Training is available on many topics related to web publishing. See the CIS Computer Education schedule for more information.

The Help Desk can assist with very basic HTML and web publishing questions, including:

• How to view the source code of a web page
• Valid construction of elements
• Diagnosing problems with image or link elements
• Moving files to and from the web server (SFTP)
• Basic use of Netscape Composer

If the Help Desk representative cannot immediately assist you because your question is about more advanced HTML coding, stylesheets, facilities on the webpub server (the main Brown web server that hosts www.brown.edu), account management, gathering statistics, security, or the like, s/he will file a problem report, which will be escalated to the appropriate CIS staff member. If your question goes beyond the scope of what CIS can help you with (e.g., scripting languages, editors other than Composer, web-enabled databases, facilities on servers other than webpub), etc., you are encouraged to post your question to the web publishers' email forum.

CIS supports (at the partial level) the following tools for web publishing. Users may email webpublishing@brown.edu for assistance with installing or using any of the following:

• WinSSH (Windows SFTP client for moving your files to and from web servers)
• MacSFTP (Macintosh SFTP client for moving your files to and from web servers)

In addition to these tools, CIS recommends two HTML editors:

• Netscape Composer - a simple page editing software; comes free with the Netscape browser
• Macromedia Dreamweaver - professional-level site-editing software, available from the Applications Server

• Photoshop - an image-editing application, available on the Applications server
• BBEdit Lite - a simple HTML editor for Macintosh, available in the Brown computing clusters
• Canvas - an image editing application, available on the Applications server
• ClarisDraw - an image creation application, available on the Applications server
• Adobe Acrobat - the PDF file creation application, available on the Applications server