Web Technical Guidelines 

Since pages for the College of Medicine and Public Health's Web Site are being developed on different computer platforms, here are a few guidelines/suggestions to ease the transition from your development machine to the College's Web Server.

Filenames
The server is a Unix machine, and so your Web site files need to conform to Unix file naming conventions:

  1. Filenames in Unix can be any length, but in the interest of brevity a limit of 32 characters including extension has been imposed. Names must have the form "something.htm" or "something.html". No multiple dots.
  2. Filenames cannot contain spaces, unlike Macintosh files. If you wish a space, use the underscore character "_" or a dash "-". Also, avoid the following characters: / ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) { } ~ , ' ` " ?
  3. The case of letters is important, thus "WEBHOME.HTML" is not the same as "webhome.html." You may use either upper or lower case or a mixture (e.g. "WebHome.html"), but you must be consistent throughout, otherwise your links will not work. Extensions must be in lower case (e.g. ".jpg").
  4. If possible, try to avoid using a machine running Windows 3.1 or DOS for your page development because of the "8.3" restriction on filenames (e.g., "filename.txt"). Administration of the site will be simpler if you can use descriptive filenames and that will be easier if you are not locked into the 8.3 restriction. This will be particularly apparent if your site has a great number of files. Windows 95 and NT both allow longer names and is preferable for this reason.
Your Directory Tree
All the files that make up your site will be placed in an appropriately-named subdirectory under the Server's top level (www.med.ohio-state.edu). This directory name will become part of your URL (Uniform Resource Locator). As an example, the Department of Pharmacology's site is located in the directory "pharm" and Pharmacology's URL begins with "http://www.med.ohio-state.edu/pharm/". If your site includes only a small number of files they can be kept in the same directory, but if you have many files you should split them among subdirectories (e.g., faculty home pages in a subdirectory called "faculty", course offerings in a directory called "curriculum", etc.).

Images, etc.
Your GIF and JPEG images should be placed in a subdirectory called "images." Similarly, if you have sound files or animations they should be put in subdirectories as well.

Publishing Your Files
After a College of Medicine and Public Health Information Provider Agreement Form has been submitted and approved, you can begin the process of publishing your files. There are two ways to transfer your Web files to the College WWW server:

  1. Bring them to 1080 Graves Hall on floppy disks or ZIP disks in Macintosh or PC format, or
  2. Transfer them over Sonnet using the file-transfer utilities that come with OfficeNet. On the Mac, the utility is Fetch, and on the PC it's WS-FTP. Both these programs allow the transfer of whole directories, so you should use this option to preserve the directory structure you've set up. If you use this method the target (remote) machine is "brighton.med.ohio-state.edu". The user name is "anonymous." When prompted, use your own email address as a password, e.g., "smith.28@osu.edu." When connected, move to the subdirectory "incoming/web/yourdepartment" and place your files there. When you are finished, notify us by emailing the webmaster@www.med.ohio-state.edu and the files will be moved to the appropriate place on the server.