CSE Authoring
Welcome to the Stanford CSE Authoring page -- home of information about
how to publish information on the cse.stanford.edu server. I did
a massive upgrade on CSE over the summer. It is much faster and much more
reliable, but editing materials is slightly different. CSE can host course
materials, or instructors can use the leland system for that. CSE also
hosts miscellaneous materials such as the course advisor page and the nifty
assignments archive.
Access Logistics
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You need an account to edit on CSE. See me to get access to a CSE account.
There is one account per project -- e.g. "cs106a" or "bermuda".
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You can access cse via appleshare in the chooser in the CS zone. It also
works over the Internet as the machine cse.stanford.edu. Appleshare access
is convenient for editing -- you can just double click edit your HTML in
place -- and it is secure against password sniffing.
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You can also use the secure FTP (SFTP) and secure copy (SCP) protocols
to move files back and forth from CSE. CSE does not support plain FTP;
it's too insecure.
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You can walk in to Nick's office and edit files directly -- there are instructions
taped to the machine.
Authoring Tips
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The canonical URL for a course on CSE looks like http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs108/.
Ancient forms like "/classes/cs108" or "cs108/current/" will stop working
some day.
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Name your subdirectories so that they will have the same name forever --
don't have a "handouts" directory, have a "handouts00-1" directory, so
that even in future quarters the URLs still work. This makes it easy to
keep old handouts accessible from quarter to quarter.
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Do not put anything up on CSE that you want to keep a secret. CSE is backed
up infrequently. Use CSE to publish information, not to store your only
copy of your list of swiss bank account numbers.
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Each course folder should contain an index.html file as the start page
for that course. I try to put a short blurb describing what the course
is about with a pointer to the syllabus -- realize that many prospective
students and other random interested parties may surf over to the page
without a lot of context. You think that people find your content deliberately,
but in fact Google is a big source of traffic.
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It's good to mention what quarter the page is for, since the page will
stay around after the course is over. The Stanford convention is that,
for example, Fall of academic 97-98 is 1-97 and spring is 3-97 (I use 97-3,
or 973, or 1997-3 so things sort rationally).
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Give subdirectories their permanent name right from the start, such as
"973handouts". In later quarters, it's just a a matter of changing a couple
URLs in the index.html to point to the archive of old handouts. I encourage
everyone to keep at least the last two quarters of handouts available.
It's handy to have a place to point prospective students to get a sense
of the course.
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It's especially important to keep old exams and solutions around. There
is evidence that some students are doing an unbelievably good job of keeping
old exams around. By making all the old exams available, at least all the
students are on an even footing.
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A URL that points to a directory, such as "http://cse.stanford.edu/class/cs108/991handouts/"
will produce a directory listing. The trailing slash is correct for directories,
and of course the short, relative form of that URL is just "991handouts/".
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It's a good ides to keep all of your file paths in lowercase although in
reality the CSE file system does not distinguish upper and lower case.
Web software can get confused when a request for /Handouts/ comes back
with a directory like /handouts/.
CSE Factoids
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The server has as aliases cs-education.stanford.edu and www-cse.stanford.edu,
but the preferred name is the short one cse.stanford.edu.
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CSE serves about 10k-20k hits per day.
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CSE is a worldwide presence -- it's clear from the logs that random people
from all over do end up pulling things off of CSE.
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For admin questions, please email nick.parlante@cs.stanford.edu
Return to CSE Home
Nick Parlante, Sept, 2001