Congratulations on your new Website! This document is meant to familiarize you with the care and feeding of your New Website. This document may be retrieved online at any time by visiting http://www.Railfan.net/railsite.txt Hang on to this document as it is your initial reference material for creating your new website and contains information unique to our network. If you are not the person responsible for the care and feeding of your website you should make this document available to your webmaster. The basic characteristics of your website management is very similar to the management of html pages in a regular user home directory. Your server web page "root directory" is your login directory on your new webserver such as yoursite.railfan.net or yoursite.com where "yoursite" is your new webserver's name and should contain a file named "home.html" which is a default "Coming Soon!" page for your website. Replace this file with your main server home page. Your server will search for one of four default pages (files) to use as its home page, index.html, index.htm, home.html and home.htm and if it doesn't find one of those pages it will display a raw directory listing to the client browser on the other end accessing your new URL such as http://yoursite.Railfan.net or http://yoursite.com/ so you'll want to have your default page named as one of the above. I prefer "home.html" as my default page name. You should only have one of those file names present to avoid future confusion. Bear in mind that the webserver is case sensitive and those particular filename must be in all small letters. Web page authoring programs are freely available from www.tucows.com, www.shareware.com and www.windows95.com. We don't recommend using Microsoft or Netscape software to create web pages as those editors often create pages that only look correct with their own company's web browsers. We do NOT support Microsoft's "Front Page Extensions" for many different reasons. It is a proprietary to Microsoft protocol and we use Apache webserver on Unix. You can use Front Page to author pages, just avoid the "extensions." You administer your site via FTP. Page updating is done by replacing the old page with a new one that you upload. Helpful tips on FTP page updating are available at http://help.bluemoon.net/webpage/ and explains where to get and how to use FTP client programs for both PC and Macintosh users. FTP to your new website's name ie: yoursite.Railfan.net or yoursite.com and login with your username and password. It will place you in your main server directory, also known as "document root", where you will likely place your main pages. How you arrange your directory tree is entirely up to you, There is no restriction on how many subdirectories you create or how many levels deep you nest them. When naming files make sure to not put quote marks or apostrophes in the name of the file as they are illegal characters in Unix filenames and the daily server maintenance run will notify me of the bad filenames. Generally, file naming should be limited to alphanumeric characters, hyphens and periods. (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, "-" and ".") Remember that Unix filesystems are case sensitive and your links and images need to be stated EXACTLY as they appear in the directory listings or they won't function or load to the page. Domain names are not case sensitive, RAILFAN.NET, RailFan.Net and railfan.net are all treated the same by Domain Name Services and web browsers. File permissions work the same as any unix webservice host. The pages must be at least "world" readble as browser users are considered to to be "nobody". CGI applications will need to be "world" executable as they are programs. The shell command to set file permissions safely to be both world readable and executable is "chmod 755 filename.html" and many ftp clients let you issue that command directly to the webserver. In most cases files uploaded or FTPed into your directory will be given world readble and executable permission. Many FTP clients allow you modify the file permissions remotely as well as overwrite, rename and delete files under your ownership, you should look for that ability when selecting one. If you do a long directory listing your files should appear similar to this: -rwxr-xr-x 1 your_is your_id 228 Jul 24 11:07 home.html It is VERY important that the last 3 characters of the permission bits not contain a "w" as that would give anyone access to overwrite, modify or delete your file! "-rwxr-xr-x" is a safe permission mode to use for webfiles. The only files that should every be world writable are CGI program datafiles that the webserver process "pseudo-user" must be able to write. If your FTP program will not allow you to set the correct permissions for your files and directories they may be set through the CGI web page at http://www.buffalonet.org/chmod.html which also shows some examples for usage. The paths for files and page links basically remain the same for your local links and image source calls as any regular user home pages, or You have access to two separate cgi-bin directories, the global system cgi-bin directory, /cgi-bin/, and your own website cgi-bin which is named "cgi" in your website login directory and is referenced via a call to /cgi/ NOT /cgi-bin/ ! It is important you not confuse the two, they are not interchangable! For example, to reference a system counter cgi the call would be: and to call one of your own cgi-bin programs from your private "cgi-bin" directory: Remember that CGI programs MUST have the last "x" permission bit set to run for a browser! The path to the perl executable is /usr/sbin/perl and the first line of perl cgi programs should be: #!/usr/bin/perl The sendmail executable is at /usr/sbin/sendmail for any CGI programs that need to access the system sendmail program directly. The bourne shell interpreter is /bin/sh. Shell script CGI programs should start with this line: #!/bin/sh We also have the C shell at /bin/csh and tcsh at /bin/tcsh for shell scripts which need to use those shell interpreters. PHP is installed on the server and all PHP pages should have a file name suffix of .php We provide very flexible counter and formmail CGI programs to give you a head start in customizing your pages. For counter examples of the many styles and options available visit http://www.bluemoon.net/counterpage.html which not only shows what each counter style will look like, but has explicit code examples to make adding a fancy custom counter to your web pages a plug 'n play operation ;) We have quite a few counter styles currently available and can add any "TrueType" font style if you can provide us with a PC compatible TrueType font if we don't already have it. You can also "seed" counter data files for you with your current number of page hits to preserve your total site hits on your page counter. We recommend using a local counter as most of the free counter sites are very slow loading and frustrate viewers of your pages with delays. Free counter sites are also known to use referrer data for marketing purposes and nobody wants to be tracked on the web. For examples of the many Railroad related counter styles available please see: http://www.railfan.net/cgi/railcounters.cgi The formmail documentation can be viewed online with your web browser at http://www.bluemoon.net/formmail.txt and you can view the source to http://www.bluemoon.net/form2.html for ideas on how to create a form page from scratch. It is always best to use a hard-coded recipient email address for formmail submissions, which requires a dedicated formmail CGI. This reduces security concerns and prevents the recipient address from being harvested by spam web spiders. If you would like a dedicated formmail CGI, please contact Henry. If you have standard "C" source code to a cgi-bin application you would like to try you can always email me, sysop@bluemoon.net, with the location of the source and I'll be glad to take a shot at compiling and running the application for you as long as it doesn't turn out to be a major ordeal ;) Monthly access statistics for your site are compiled on the first of each month. You will notice a directory in your login directory named "wwwstats" which holds the statistics pages in html format for each month's accesses. These pages show total bytes transfered, total accesses for each file, daily averages, accesses broken down by domain or IP, etc. You can view these pages after the monthly stats have been generated by pointing your browser at a directory named wwwstats on your website such as http://yoursite.Railfan.net/wwwstats/ for Railfan.net subdomains or http://yoursite.com/wwwstats where "yoursite.com" is your website's URL. You may be asked for your access password which is the same as your site maintenance FTP login password. The password protection is controlled by the .htaccess file in the wwwstats dir and will be periodically recreated if deleted. Additional users can be added to the password file if wanted, see http://railpix.railfan.net/pwdonly.html and http://railpix.railfan.net/htpasswd.html Your disk usage and limits may be checked with a web browser at: http://yoursitename.com/diskquota where "yoursitename.com" is the site name of your webserver, ie: http://LNE.Railfan.net/diskquota and be sure to leave off a trailing slash in the URL. Railfan.net website help and utility links can be accessed at: http://www.Railfan.net/utility.html This should keep you busy doing webwork for a bit, but if you run into a snag you can't find your way out of you can email webmaster@bluemoon.net for html or server questions or ring up 716-876-6398 between 10am and 6pm EST weekdays to try and reach one of our admins or me via voice phone call. Good Luck and enjoy your new webserver! - Henry, Blue Moon Network Admin