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Web Page resources


Comments Plugin for Any Web Page

Included below is an easy-to-use and easy-to-modify script which allows anyone finding your web page to record a comment or question, and have it posted to that page for all to see. It also allows you the flexibility to remove comments which have outlived their usefulness and to adjust the format in which the comments appear. The script requires a web server which handles php scripts (our math server does).

Course Webpage Template

Version 0.3.1 (trs - Dec 2003)

Web resources are a moving target. While five years ago it was a virtual novelty that a course have a web page, it has become the case today that students expect every course to have a web page, providing at least the basic requirements of the courses, syllabus, and homework assignments.

Many faculty have provided web pages for at least some of their courses in the past, but we have reached the point where it is desirable to have web pages for all of our courses. It is not only a service to our current students, but also an effective way for prospective undergraduate and graduate students to evaluate (in part) the department course offerings.

To that end, you will find below version 0.3.1 of some web page templates for courses. One of the problems with web pages is that they are often a chore to maintain. In this preliminary version, I have automated some of the more mundane tasks of building the web page. A good example is the syllabus page. Of course to build the syllabus page, you need to have entered the raw data (dates, sections, topics), but then comes the task of building the table, entering each tr and td entry, making the pretty colors and so on. With these templates, the only thing you need to type is the syllabus entries. The rest is done automatically, including the banner and navigation bar. In fact, if you click on any other link, you will see the same banner and navigation bar, because the information is entered once and then carried forward to each page. By the way, you can get to the course homepage by clicking on the course number Math 13.

So in this first iteration of automating web pages, you have to fill out a global settings file (with information like course name and title, instructor and section information. You will still have to tweak the various pages, but the task should be somewhat simpler to achieve a reasonable result.

Of course, if you have questions, contact linuxhelp.

From the link Math 13, you can see what the pages will look like. Oh, there are currently three "color schemes", blue (shown), green, and gray, which you can try by changing one line in the global settings file.

The full instructions are here. Finally, the tar-gzipped file can be downloaded from here. The contents of this file will replace that of your public_html directory.

Email Addresses and mailto: Links

It is very convenient to have mailto: links on webpages for easy communication and feedback. However, every email address present in the web page or its HTML source is easily detected by web-crawling robots. This is of course just one of the ways how email addresses end up in spammers' address lists, but you may consider this before putting your address into HTML.

There is no easy and secure alternative short of creating an HTML form and writing a script to process it (and send an email). One alternative would be to use the image of an email address, like this: (note there is no underlying mailto: either). You can also use some modified and intuitive/self-explanatory form of the address, for example mail me.

MathJax

MathJax is available locally, on gauss. It is already automatically included in every standard Math Dept. website page. To activate MathJax on web pages maintained by you (course or personal web pages) copy and paste the following <script> line into <head> section of your web page:


<script src="/include/MathJax/MathJax.js?config=default" type="text/javascript"></script>