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How to edit open web pages

--Rich Sutton, Sep 12 2004 --Anna Koop
It's easy to create and edit open pages; this page tells how.  Please consult the style guidelines before editing.  If you just want to add to the end of a page, see extensions.

Warning: the open pages system is no longer being actively maintained or developed.  It works, mostly, but should not be looked to as a long-term solution to creating web content.  In short, its use is deprecated.

The recommended way to edit open web pages is by using Composer, the web-page editor built into the Netscape browser and its open-source equivalent, Mozilla. Composer allows editing in the WYSIWYG style (What You See Is What You Get) familiar from modern document editors.  This approach gives you complete control of the page and is very convenient and intuitive. If you can point, click, and type then you will have no trouble getting started in composer (a review of composer).  You don't have to use Mozilla as your browser when you're not editing, but if you do then you can instantly edit any open page you come across.  To follow this approach:

  1. Download and install Mozilla.
  2. Establish Mozilla settings.  See here.
  3. Browse to the page you would like to edit. Reload the page if your browser window has been open for a while and may not be up-to-date.
  4. Open the page for editing by selecting "Edit page" from the File menu, or just by hitting Command-E (on Mac) or Control-E (on Windows or Linux).  This opens the page in Composer, Mozilla's built-in html editor.
  5. Edit the page in Composer.  Composer is WYSIWYG, so it is very intuitive and easy to use.  .
  6. Publish the page by selecting "Publish" from the File menu, or by hitting Command-shift-S (on Mac) or Control-Shift-S (on Windows or Linux).  If all goes well you will get a little window with green checkmark(s) which pops up briefly and then goes away.  If the publishing fails there will be one or more red Xs and the little window will remain open, with a cryptic error message.  If this happens, click on "Help" at the bottom of the page and do not close the Composer window.  This might be a good time to write your changes out to a local file (menu File>Save As).
  7. Refresh the browser window to see your changes.

It is also possible to edit open pages without Mozilla/composer, using arbitrary other tools, by making and editing a local copy and then publishing it back out to the web.  Each time you edit:

    1. Browse to the page and make a local copy.  In Mozilla, you select "Save page as" (Command-S) from the "File" menu.
    2. Edit the local copy in your own way, with your own tools.  Just be sure not to alter the comments at the end of the file, particularly "<!--Auto content-->" and below.
    3. Publish the local copy back to the server. In Mozilla, browse to your local copy and then select "Publish as" from the "File" menu. Use the filename and other settings from 1 to publish to the right place.  Be sure to check include images. If all goes well you will get a little window with all green checkmarks which pops up briefly and then goes away.  If the publishing fails there will be one or more red Xs and the little window will remain open, with a cryptic error message.  If this happens, click on "Help" at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions there.
Finally, if you don't want to download and use mozilla at all, make your page any way you want and then just upload it to the open-page server using the python put script.  After downloading the file "QuickPut" to a convenient place, then in the same directory type:

python QuickPut yourPage.html targetURL.html

where "yourPage.html" is of course the name of the web page you created by other means, and "targetURL.html" is the place on the web page server to which you want to upload the page.  Normally you will have downloaded some open page (e.g., by invoking "view source" on a browser, then cutting and pasting to a text file) and will be uploading it back to the same URL.  As an example, targetURL.html might be "rlai.cs.ualberta.ca/rlai/test.html". The server will ensure that you don't accidently overwrite someone elses changes, as usual.  That is, it will allow the upload only if the file does not exist or has not been changed since you downloaded it (and you have not changed the text of the page after the "<!--Auto content-->" tag).

Creating New Pages

New pages can be created and authored simply by browsing to the page and editing it in Mozilla.  In these cases it is as if all possible pages already exist and simply need to be written.  If you are using your own authoring tools, then you can create the page yourself, locally, and then publish the local copy as described above.  All these methods work properly with subdirectories, creating them when necessary.

It is also possible to create private and semi-private pages.

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Adding Non-html Files

The mechanisms described so far suffice to safely create and edit any html content, including embedded images (these must be less than 1 megabyte). Uploading read-only content such as pdfs or binary files is unnecessary because they can be kept on non-open-page servers and linked to from open pages, as discussed here.

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