The gloworm cluster web server

Server information

• The official name is www-tcad.stanford.edu. This name is currently an alias for gloworm.stanford.edu, but that may change in the future. Please always use www-tcad.stanford.edu in all external references.
• The server runs the apache httpd. Configuration files can be found in /opt/WWW/apache/etc on gloworm. Logs can be found in /opt/WWW/apache/var/log on gloworm.
• General user-level CGI is not available, but a small number of users have permission to set up CGI scripts. Contact action@gloworm if you need CGI capabilities beyond form submission.

  For forms, I recommend using formage or mailmerge on the leland web servers.

• Our web server is visited regularly by search engines (e.g. Alta Vista, HotBot, etc.) to gather information for their databases. If you don't want certain hierarchies searched, contact webmaster@gloworm.stanford.edu.

User pages

• ~user/ expands to /home/user/WWW/
• index.html is the name of the file to be served as the home document.
• A large number of graphics files is avaliable in /home/www/htdocs/gifs (/gifs if referenced within a html file).

• Because gloworm does not use AFS as the user filesytem, normal Unix permissions apply (ignore the AFS acl instructions in www.stanford.edu's instructions).

  The http daemon runs as the least privileged user, so all files and directories must world-readable (i.e. chmod a+r *).

Web authoring (resources and recommendations)

• Yahoo has some pointers to (mostly beginning) resources.
• The World Wide Web Consortium has pointers to standards. They also have an excellent style guide for publishing on the web.
• The weblint utility is useful for finding errors in HTML files to make sure that they will render properly in any browser.
• Remember, the three most important properties of a HTML document are:
  1. content
  2. Content
  3. CONTENT!!!
  Cool visual features may convince a visitor to actually look at the page, but it is the content that will make them bookmark the page.