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How to contribute to our pages

If you have information, additions, corrections or whatever to contribute to our web pages - mainly the wisdom area and your home page - and are a member of our group, this is how to do it:

First a word about directory structure

Creating/editing HTML

We generally have three HTML editors available to edit or create a page. The first two are WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), the third is a text editor that knows all about HTML.

• Netscape Composer (part of Netscape 4.0x) - choose File/Edit Page from the menu when you are on a page that needs an update and start working. Alternatively, choose Communicator/Netscape Composer and start a new page. Use the Save As function to publish your page, the Publish function does not work with our server.
  
• cosmocreate and webmagic - on SGIs only. Cosmocreate is available on obelix, webmagic on all our SGIs. Full featured visual HTML editor (screenshot)and fully integrated into the Irix desktop environment, i.e. double-clicking an image fires up the appropriate image editor.
  
• asWedit -great HTML editor for those who want to see the HTML tags (screenshot)and need full control over HTML. It includes very strong checking and will let you know what's wrong with your HTML. My personal favorite.
  
• Use of vi or other plain text editor is not recommended. While you may be able to create a page that looks ok in your browser, the HTML may be wrong in places and the page may look horrendous or even break in some other browser. At the very least check the HTML for correctness.

To create a new page, open template.html, save as some new file and go from there. If you'd like to create a page like one you've seen on the net, download that page as source, load it into an HTML editor and edit to taste. (You may need to download images on that page separately). Save your work into the appropriate area with some reasonable file name.

Guidelines

Date and sign your page. At the bottom of the page add the creation date and/or date of last revision, add your name and include a link from your name to mailto:<yourID>@scripps.edu. When clicked on this fires up a mailer with your address preloaded. Also, check your spelling. You are publishing a document that may be viewed by thousands of people all over the world, so don't embarrass yourself.

Make sure your <IMG> tags contain width and height attributes as well as an alternative text description. Most modern HTML editors will add these tags, but if you use vi (not recommended) please add them yourself. Pages will load much faster that way and you help surfers with text-only browsers (like search engines, for example). The syntax is like this: <IMG SRC="cover2.jpg" ALT="Cover of Nature Structural Biology, Sept. 1995" WIDTH="337" HEIGHT="291"> with width and height in pixels. Imginfo on SGIs will tell you these values.
For more really good tips on sound web design, see 100 Things you Can do Right Now To Make Your Web Site Better and SUN's Guide to Web Style.

Webmagic, cosmocreate and Composer display a page almost as it will look in netscape, but links don't work, of course. To really check what you've accomplished (please verify those links!), load the page into netscape. The URL will be http://structbio.vanderbilt.edu/chazin/<file>.html Better still, Netmechanic lets you thoroughly check your page(s) and its links.

Please let me know of changes and additions you've made so that I can maintain my illusion of knowing what's going on and - more importantly - update other relevant pages with links and information to round out things.

Note that everything is immediately live and available to everyone, provided that they know the URL or that there is a link from existing pages.

More information:
Image preparation for web pages
Access restriction