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Introduction Instructors create and maintain a per-quarter web for each of the courses they teach. Additionally, starting Autumn 99, the webmaster creates and maintains a single-file per-course web with limited opportunity for instructors to add content to that index. This document explains the hows, wheres, and whys of course webs. Advance to: Course Web Structure This document was last modified on 21 September, 2001. Course Web Structure Course webs are created in the /cse/www/education/courses/ tree (Windows users: that Unix path corresponds to \\ntdfs\cs\cse\www\education\courses), with an index of course webs maintained by the webmaster in /cse/www/education/course-webs.html. Before each academic quarter starts, the webmaster creates a new per-quarter directory for each course being taught that quarter for the use of the instruction team in that tree. The naming convention for the per-quarter directories consists of two digits from the year, followed by a two-character "quarter code" from the set wi, sp, su, au. For example, for a course named CSE 333 being taught in Winter 2000, the directory name will be /cse/www/education/courses/333/00wi/, which corresponds to a URL of http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/333/00wi/. (The corresponding Windows path is \\ntdfs\cs\cse\education\courses\333\01wi.) For convenience, a number of symbolic links are also maintained that serve to allow course webs to be accessed via alternative names:
Instructors: if your course is brand new, you may find that the course web directory for your course isn't yet in place. In such a case, the first step is to check and see if a course group exists to hold ownership of the course web, and if you are a member of the course group (see below). The unix groups(1) command will show you what groups you belong to. Contact support@cs.washington.edu to request the creation of or a change in membership of the course group. Contact the webmaster for creation of the course web directory, most usefully after the group is in place. Note: Undergrad TAs will need to use a special gateway machine in order to maintain course webs. Default Documents You will often see a URL such as http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/CurrentQtr/cse333/. That URL works because the web server is configured to serve a request for a directory with the contents of a "default document"-- that is, a file with a special name. At CSE, that special name is index.html (or index.htm-- either filename will work). Thus, the file corresponding to that example URL is /cse/www/education/courses/CurrentQtr/cse333/index.html. (Windows users: \\ntdfs\cs\cse\www\education\courses\CurrentQtr\cse333\index.html). The expectation is that instructors will create such a default document in their course web directory. The published URL for each course is of the form http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/CurrentQtr/course-number/, so if the default document isn't created, users will get "document not found" errors. As an aside, note that we have arranged for URLs of the form http://www.cs.washington.edu/course-number to be redirected to the course web for the current quarter. For example, browsing to http://www.cs.washington.edu/333 (or http://www.cs.washington.edu/cse333) will be cause a redirect to http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/cse333/CurrentQtr/. That's a handy shortcut for users that, again, only works when instrutors create a default document in their course web directory. Course Web Ownership Each course will have an associated Unix group by the time it's taught for the first time. The group membership will (or should) consist of all the members of the current teaching team and all the instructors who commonly teach the course. The per-course web directory (e.g. /cse/www/education/courses/333/) is owned by some common instructor of the course, with group ownership set to the associated group, and is group writable. The per-quarter web directory is owned by the instructor of the course that quarter. In order to allow collaboration of the teaching team in the maintenance of the course web, all files that are writable by owner in the course web should also be writable by the associated group. In fact, a cron job runs nightly to enforce that rule. Judicious adjustment of the umask of teaching team members that work from Unix can help keep group writability. umask 002 works well. Access to Course Webs By default, content in the course web tree is available to hosts from outside the department. Under some circumstances, this may not be what you want. Information on how to control access to your content is in Controlling Access to Your Documents. Course Web Archives Course webs from previous quarters can be an asset to the teaching team, to students, and to colleagues at other institutions, so we tend to leave them in place. However, we have a limited amount of disk storage on the web server that we are able to keep actively backed up. Writing in September 1999, it has never been necessary to delete old course webs because of disk space limitations. We do, however, move them periodically to archival, read-only storage on cheap, low-performance disks. Currently, we are keeping somewhat more than one year's webs in writable storage. When webs are moved to the archive, neither paths nor URLs change, but neither is it possible for instructors to manipulate the content or permissions- such manipulation require an action by the webmaster. The implications of this for course web content providers are:
Per-course Webs 
Historically, few courses had per-course webs. Links from the course web index were to cseXXX/CurrentQtr/. Downsides to that strategy were twofold:
Discussion refers to the figure at right, which is a thumbnail of a typical per-course web. The per-course webs are created using the CSE Content Creation and Maintenance Tool, and as such have "orthodox" design elements. A discussion of the editability of each follows:
By following these guidelines, you can add content to per-course webs that will persist as long as you'd like. Support for CSE 590 Certain courses, mostly sections of CSE 590 Special Topics in Computer Sciences, are not listed in the online course catalog. These fall into two broad categories:
It is useful to provide a per-course web for those courses in the latter category, but the information we need can't be gleaned from the online catalog. To help create and maintain them, there exists a Per-course Web Configuration tool. The capabilities of the tool are easily seen by running it (to do so now, click here.) The basic idea is that it creates and maintains a simple per-course configuration file that establishes similar information as is provided by the online catalog for standard courses. Because the information in the file it creates is used in the creation of any per-course web, and overrides information from both the existing per-course web and the online catalog, it can be useful in unusual circumstances for cataloged courses as well:
This tool is expected to be used primarily by the webmaster, but is available to any instructor. |
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Computer Science & Engineering University of Washington Box 352350 Seattle, WA 98195-2350 (206) 543-1695 voice, (206) 543-2969 FAX [comments to webmaster] |
