Facilities

Facilities
This document provides information about what you should expect to find as part of your commercial web space account.

Contents
Web space and directories
Web pages
cgi-bin and scripts
Logs
Facilities FAQ

Your web space and its directories
When you are logged on to the web server, you will see six directories that have been created for you. They are

docs
cgi-bin
cgi-files
logs
private
sounds

The docs directory is the place where all of the files you want to be accessible from your site go, i.e. your html files and images. It is this directory which pages are served from by your URL, for example www.yourname.co.uk. You should place a file called index.html in this directory - this is the default page which will always be served when www.yourname.co.uk is used, otherwise a directory listing will be seen.

The cgi-bin directory is the place where you place your CGI scripts, these must be uploaded as ASCII files, and made executable. For more details see the section on cgi-bin and scripts below.

The cgi-files directory is where you can place your cgi script data files, used by your cgi scripts.

The logs directory is where your log files are created.

The private directory is where you can place files which are not available to browsers or your own files. This directory is particularly useful for placing files which you have uploaded but are not ready to be made available on your web site.

The sounds directory is the place to put your Real Audio files if you have commercial real audio service with us.

Web pages
The docs directory is the place where all of the files you want to access from your web page should be stored. This directory is linked to your top level directory in your web space. This means that any html files placed in docs appears on the web at the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or Web address) e.g. www.yoursite.co.uk.

For example, if you upload a file called test.html and copy it into docs it will have the URL www.yoursite.co.uk/test.html.

However, if you upload a file called index.html, this page is displayed automatically, i.e. you don't need to reference it using www.yoursite.co.uk/index.html, you can just use www.yoursite.co.uk.

You can make subdirectories in the docs directory for storing and ordering your html and image files. The most common use is to create a directory called images, in which you place all your image files. If you make a sub-directory in your docs directory, to reference the files in this subdirectory you need to add the directory name to the end of your URL. For example if you created a directory called /more-docs and moved test.html from docs into docs/more-docs, it will have the URL www.yoursite.co.uk/more-docs/test.html; equally, if you place an index.html in more-docs then this will be served automatically.

cgi-bin and scripts
The cgi-bin is the place where you can store your scripts. These are programs that can be called by your web pages. They are typically used to process the information taken from an html form.

We support CGI scripts that are written in Perl versions 4 or 5. These should be uploaded in ASCII and have to have the correct permissions set so that they will run.

More information about running scripts and using the cgi-bin can be found in the Developing Your Site Further section, under Using cgi-bins.

By default we uploaded automatically two scripts to your cgi-bin directory for you: Count.cgi and form-mail.pl.

count.cgi is the script that you can use for a graphical counter on your web pages to store how many hits those pages get. More details on the counter can be found in the Developing Your Site Further section, under Using Counters.

form-mail.pl is an example script which you can use to email you the contents of a html form filled out by someone looking at your web site. Again, more details can be found in the Developing Your Site Further section, under Using form-mail.pl.

Logs
There are
4 types of logs available:

NCSA common log format - these are what the old system provided, i.e. access logs showing who looked at what and when.

NCSA Combined - Readable into most log analyzers.

Native log format - these are NCSA logs plus referrer and user agent information.

Summary logs - these are logs that list a summary of hits.
Some examples:

NCSA common log format:
194.159.66.2 - 0 [24/Feb/1998:10:27:33 +0000] "GET /restricted/test.html HTTP/1.0" 200 147

[Where, 194.159.66.2 is the machine address of the machine that looked at file /restricted/test.html on 24/Feb/1998 at 10:27. The numbers at the end (200 147) are status codes returned by the Apache web server - more details about these can be found at the Apache web site.]

NCSA Combined log format:
sample.demon.co.uk - 0 [01/Jan/2001:12:34:56 +0000] "GET /images/thing.gif HTTP/1.0" 200 1234 http://www.example.com/ "mozilla/3.0"

[Where, sample.demon.co.uk is the machine address of the machine that looked at file /images/thing.gif on 01/Jan/2001 at 12:34:56. The numbers at the end (200 1234) are status codes returned by the Apache web server - more details about these can be found at the Apache web site. The http://www.example.com/ is the referer webpage.]

Native log format:
195.173.128.11 194.159.66.2 - 0 [25/Feb/1998:09:16:45 +0000] "GET /test.html HTTP/1.0" 200 235 "Mozilla/3.0 (Win95; I)" "http://www.psd.demon.net/webteam/newweb/betatesters.html" "-"

[Where, machine 194.159.66.2 looked at /test.html on 25/Feb/1998 at 09:16 using browser Mozilla/3.0 (Win95; I), having got there from http://www.psd.demon.net/webteam/newweb/betatesters.html]

Summary logs:
Statistics for 1998 February 25
Total of 940 bytes transferred on 4 hits.

[This give details of the number of hits and the amount of bandwidth used to transfer the information]

By default (unless you specified otherwise when you placed your order) you will only get the summary logs. To request a different log style, please contact our Commercial helpdesk on 0845 272 2555.

Facilities FAQ
Further information about the facilities and web services offered can be found in the Service FAQ