Tips, warnings, and frequently asked questions

The open page server keeps an archive of every version of a page. Click on the "Restore" link at the bottom of the page to view old versions.

Open pages are for collaborative authoring; they are not places to park read-only content such as PDFs.  These should be located elsewhere and then linked to from the open page.  This is not just a question of resources---it is a separation of functionality.  Open pages try to do collaborative authoring well; this objective would only be diluted by trying to provide miscellaneous web space as well. 

If you think about it, you may realize that you already have access to web space that you can use for read-only web content.  And if you can think of no organization that will provide you with reliable free web space, then perhaps you can understand why an open-page server might also decline to do this.

Separating read-only web content from the open-page server is potentially a problem because it will then be managed differently and may not be reliable.  Unfortunately, this problem may be unavoidable at the current time.  The solution is for someone to provide a service for cheap, reliable, permanent storage of arbitrary web content.  A permanent data store.  It is an interesting challenge.  The person who solves it will become famous and rich.  Creating this service it is not a small undertaking and is best done separately from open pages.

The content at the bottom is mandatory for every open web page. It is automatically appended to every open file.

If you set an </h1> heading in a page then the title will automatically be set to that. Or, in the Mozilla editor, rather than publishing the page, select "Publish As" from the file menu. From there you can set the title before publishing. 

Do not publish images with spaces, hyphens, periods, or other special characters in their file names. Underbars_are_ok.  There is also a limit on how big images can be, maybe 1 megabyte.  Else click here to find out why publishing failed.

This is really easy.  You just make the page and don't tell people outside your group about it.  These are called unlisted pages because they are like unlisted telephone numbers---private just because nobody knows about them.  Tell your group members to put the secret URLs in their bookmarks, but not as links on their web pages.  If an unlisted page has a public link to it, then it is no longer unlisted; google will follow it to find the page.

These are also called read-only pages and aliased pages.

What you want is a private page with a public face.  The page is made private by giving it an unlisted or secret URL, as described in the answer to the question immediately above.  The public face is provided by a public alias URL that effectively forwards to the secret URL. Group members browse directly to the page via the secret URL and can therefore edit in the normal way.  But others know only the alias, which can't be edited.

The alias URL must be in a special top-level directory "alias".   For example, on the rlai open server your alias URL might be "/alias/publicnameofpage.html".  The alias URL is created by browsing to it.  This is the same procedure used to create a normal open page, but here in the alias directory it instead creates a hidden link to another URL (which you provide).  If you provide the secret URL of an unlisted page then you will have successfully created a semi-private page.

If you link to a semi-private page, be sure to link to its alias URL and not the secret URL.

Alias URLs don't seem to be working at the moment.

Find a page that already has a mouseover, cut and paste it into your page, then doubleclick it to edit its text.

You just delete them in Composer, the Mozilla editor.  To have this done automatically, for every page you create, see the answer to the next question.

You are strongly encouraged to use only .html as an extension. In almost every other case the content will be treated and displayed as plain text. You cannot create an executable program; You may feel free to upload program files, but they will only display as text. Use of the .htm is allowed, but discouraged.

You are strongly encouraged to use only .html as an extension. .shtml will display properly, but will not have the Open Web features (the automatic content at the bottom) and will not edit properly. So don't use it. If the automatic content is not displaying on a new page, change the extension to .html. If the extension is .html, weird. Please email.

Rats. This is Mozilla weirdness when you publish multiple times with the "Include images and files" box checked. If you are comfortable working with source code, click on the "<HTML> Source" tab in composer and fix it there. If not, email a description of your problem.

This was a problem with early versions of Mozilla/Composer.  Update to a newer version and it should mostly go away.  Not entirely though, so maybe it is best just to delete them and move on.

The last item in the bottom material (the numbers) gives information about the page, including the subscribers (only the first parts of the subscribers' email addresses are shown). 

The two numbers at the end of the page's bottom material are the number of visits to the page and the number of subscribers.

This is called a "signature mouseover".  It is just a little image that puts up a text message when the mouse rests momentarily over it.  In open pages they are often used as an inobtrusive way to sign a web page or portion thereof, or to indicate the time at which an extension or other change was made.

The two numbers at the end of the page's bottom material are the number of visits to the page and the number of subscribers.

Then we would like to to hear about it so that we can answer it for you or for the next person who has it.  Please click here and type in your question.