General Questions

Home Pages

Information on home pages is in the Home Page FAQ.


How do I map between URLs and filenames?

(Much of this information is obsoleted by the deployment in 2012 of a Drupal CMS (content management system) for core departmental content.)

The following table shows how files are named by a URL on www.cs.washington.edu:

FileURL
/cse/www/pathnamehttp://www.cs.washington.edu/pathname
/projects/pathnamehttp://www.cs.washington.edu/research/projects/pathname

How do I get space on one of our web servers?

If you want space for project-related WWW material, and your project already has a project disk, you are encouraged to use this disk to store WWW-related files. The project disk may already have a top-level WWW area for a project, or you may need to set one up. If you create a new one, let webmaster@cs know about it, and it will be added to the index of research projects.

If you don't have a project disk, or want create a web covering material that is relevant to the department, send mail to support@cs, and a directory will be set up for you, probably under /cse/www2/.

I want to write a CGI script. What do I do ?

If for personal use, see User CGI for CSE Users.

If you need to use CGI scripts for some department-related work, support will create a directory for you in which your scripts can be executed. Without this, it is "impossible" for you to use CGI scripts. By default, access to these CGI scripts is limited to machines within the department only - if you want or need wider access to them than this, then expect to have your program subjected to fairly stringent scrutiny, and the possibility that you will need to rewrite it or modify it before wider access can be granted.

Can I run my own HTTP server ?

Yes, if you need to. We ask that you discuss running your own server with the Compute Science Lab staff, first.

How do I get a directory index to happen for a directory?

On the filesystem, navigate to the directory you'd like an auto-index for. If you have a file called .htaccess there, edit it, if not, create it.

Place the following line in the file to tell the server to serve up a directory listing:Options +Indexes

How do I control who can read my WWW files?

To control who can access your stuff, or from where, you will need an access control file.

This file is called .htaccess. Please see here for more information: https://www.cs.washington.edu/lab/web#authentication.

How do I get a pointer to my home page added to the list of grad, faculty, whatever?

(Here are the indices of grads, faculty, and staff.)

Under http://www.cs.washington.edu/people are a number of subwebs that contain an index of various categories of people within the department, such as graduate students, undergraduates, faculty and staff.

You might expect that you could simply send mail to webmaster@csand ask to be added to one of these lists. Alas, you'd be mistaken.

Graduate and Undergraduate Students Listing

It is a violation of the University of Washington's privacy regulations for us to disclose your status as a student here. Therefore, we cannot add your name to this list (or remove it) without your explicit permission. See https://mycse.cs.washington.edu for some controls on what information gets published in our directories.

Other Listings

For faculty and staff, the index is generated nightly from a database. There is, of course, no policy against disclosing the identities of faculty and staff. If you have a web page, it will be linked.

What content is/is not suitable for a home page hosted on a UW CSE machine?

The answer to this differs somewhat depending upon your role at the University.

If you are an employee of the University-- faculty or staff-- your content should be restricted to that directly related to your job function. A strict interpretation of policy would forbid anything of a personal nature.

If you are a student, policy is less severe with regard to personal content.

Under no circumstances, though, can any user use University equipment for anything that could be construed as commercial purposes, such as offering items or services for sale, or for partisan political purposes, or for unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials.

Here are relevant links to documents offered by the University of Washington:

How do I get listed in the directories of (under)graduate students ?

The CSE web includes lists of the faculty, staff and students in the department. There are internal and public versions of each student directory. The internal version is accessible to all students in your own program, and the public version is accessible to anybody.

To protect your privacy (and to comply with federal privacy legislation), we allow you to control which (if any) of your personal information is displayed. To do so, please visit the internal directory page corresponding to your program: http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-php/students/ugrad/ for undergrads, http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-php/students/grad/ for full-time graduate program students, or http://norfolk.cs.washington.edu/htbin-php/students/pmp/ for professional masters program students. There, you will find a link to a form you can fill out to set your directory display preferences.

How do I get my home page listed in the index for [staff, faculty] ?

The faculty and staff indices are maintained automatically. Please send mail to support@cs if you find that you should be but are not yet listed in the appropriate index.