1 Customizing your Maintenance and Public Pages
You can change the display settings of your maintenance page by clicking on the [display-settings] link in the lower right of the page. There are two types of settings: settings for public pages, and settings for maintenance pages. The settings will affect your public and maintenance pages respectively. Your public pages are the pages shown to the entire world and are available at http://yourdomain.com/users/your_screen_name. Your maintenance page is /homepage/, the page through which you maintain your webspace. You can also customize the way you view your files. The directory listing can be normal or hierarchical. This can be set using the [ normal view | tree view ] buttons at the upper right of the screen. By clicking on a directory, you browse its content (in the normal view), or you browse content rooted at it (in the tree view).
2 Creating Files
You can create files by clicking on the "create file" link. You will
be prompted for the name, and an empty file with that name will be
created. Mind however that to be able to invoke the editor on a file,
it should have a .text, .html, .htm, .txt or anyother extension that
represents a mime type of text/*. If you're unsure of what this means,
just end the filename in .html if it's an html file or .text if it's a
text file. If you do not know html then, for your own good, I advise
you to learn it. It is a very good advice. Take it. Html is very very
easy to learn. Meanwhile, you can just name your files ending with
.text or just use the "publish content" option. It requires no
knowledge of html. The created file is placed in the directory you are
currently browsing. Html files have the following format:
<html>
<head>
<title>title-goes-here</title>
</head>
<body>
body-text-goes-here
</body>
</html>
To learn about the
things you can do in the body text, read the lower half of section
5.1 of this document
2.1 Index files and generated indices
If a web user requests a file from your webspace which is actually a directory, then the system generates a default index page for it. The format of the index page is such: your portrait (if you uploaded one following the links in your workspace) in the top right, your name as heading, and "webspace at your-system-name" as subheading. Then it displays a listing of files in the directory. If you do not wish to have a generated index, you can create an index file in that directory. By default filenames index.html, index.htm, and Default.htm will be treated by the system as index files and will be served when a directory is requested by the web browser. The presence of an index file makes it impossible for the web browser to lit the contents of that directory.
3 Uploading Files
You can upload files from your local computer to your homepage webspace by clicking on the "upload file" link. You can either type the full filename on the local filesystem or press the browse button to browse your local filesystem to select the file you want to upload. Please mind your limited quota space before deciding on which files to upload.
4 Creating Folders
Create folders using the "create folder" link. You are prompted for a folder name and a description. Choose a nice description for your folders as these descriptions are displayed alongside the folder name in the generated index pages which the world sees. You can remove, rename, or move folders by using the remove, rename, and move links respectively. A folder which is not empty cannot be deleted.
5 Invoking the Content Manager
Click the "publish content" link to publish managed content on your site. You have to provide four parameters to the content manager: the content type, short name, full name, and subsections. Content type determines the type of your content. It can be anything from "book", "magazine", "newsletter", "encyclopedia", to anything you can come up with. The short name is a short name which describes the content. A specially marked folder with that name is created to store the content. The full name is the full name of your content. For example, if you're publishing your book then this ought to be the complete title of the book etcetra. In subsections, provide what one subsection of the content is called. For a book, this could be "chapter". If the content type is chapter, this could be "section". Please mind that you must provide a singular in this field.
5.1 Managing Content
I will illustrate this with an example. Suppose I click on "publish content" and create content of type "magazine", short name "mobmag", full name "Mobin's Foolish Magazine", and subsections "article". This tells the content manager that I wish to publish a magazine which is composed of articles (multiple level hierarcies in content is possible but not discussed here). The content manager creates a folder "mobmag" (which is marked as a a magazine). When I click on "mobmag" to browse its contents, I see one file in it already, "Introductory Text". You can only edit or remove this file. The web viewer sees the contents of this file on the main magazine page (in this case http://mydomain.com/users/mobin/mobmag/) above the table of contents. To add an article, click on the "add article" link. This adds an empty article which you can then edit. While creating articles, choose meaningful descriptions for them. You can use html in these files if you want. This gives you the ability to show uploaded photos i your web content. The contents of these files are pasted within larger html files when these are served so you should not use the <html>, <title>, <body> etcetra tags. Also, since these files are really html, you will need to escape <, >, and & with <, > and & if any of these are used as text. So you can enclose text within the <h2> and </h2> to make it a second level heading, <b> and </b> to make it bold, <i> and </i> to make it italicised and more importantly, you can use something like <a href=http://whatever address>whatever link name</a> to provide a link to any addess on the web. Also, you can have something like <img src=picture-filename> to display the picture which has the name picture-filename. This way you can upload picture files and then show them in your documents.
5.2 Deleting Managed Directories
Delete all files in a managed directory by using the remove links next to them and then go to the parent directory and then remove the managed directory.
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