Hi There!

I'm Dan Schlegel, an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at SUNY Oswego

Assignment 2: Enabling Your Web Work Site

Overview

Your task is to get your Web Work Site in order, make it available to the world, and present it by means of a well-defined demo to one of the CS1 TAs.

Why do it?

By completing this more or less clerical task you will:

  1. Make visible the fact that you have come to completion on Lab 1, Lab 2, and the Microworld Problem Solving assignment.
  2. Demonstrate the ability to focus on details of file system creation and maintenance.
  3. Demonstrate skills with respect to working in a powerful text editor to craft hypertexts.
  4. Prepare the way for archiving all of the laboratory and programming assignment work that you do in the CS1 course this semester.

The Entrance

Please finish Lab 3 before continuing on to the next task of this assignment. Note that in doing so you will have arranged for your work from Lab 1, Lab 2, and the “Microworld Problem Solving” assignment to appear on (i.e., to be referenced from) your site.

Task 1: Make Your Web Work Site Available to the World

Make your work site available to the world. This will involve changing some permissions on files and directories.

  1. Log in to a sanctioned machine and open a terminal.
  2. While in your home directory, make use of the change mode (chmod) command to allow others to read and execute files in your home directory, but not the ability to write files. To do this, type:
    chmod 755 .
  3. Now we will do the same for your public_html directory. Type:
    chmod 755 public_html

These instructions have been adapted from this page. You should take a look at the warning on that page under “Step 2.2 Giving your directory the right permissions”, and decide whether you wish to follow the advice given there.

Task 2: Check your work!

You should conceive of the process of checking your work with respect to this assignment in terms of two subtasks:

  1. Make sure that your site is, indeed, available to the world by typing the address of your site on the CS Department machines into a Web browser. Thus, you will type something like this: http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~YOURUSERNAME/CS1WorkSite/
  2. Click on all of the links on your page to make sure that they all work properly. If they don’t, you must fix them.

Task 3: Demo your site to a TA

Demo your site to a TA in the following rather indirect way:

  1. Ask a TA to take a look at your Web Work Site on a browser running in their account. Thus, they will do all of the interactions. You will merely sit next to them and answer whatever questions they might have, including those pertaining to you name and your username.
  2. The TAs will click on a representative collection of your links.
  3. If your site is properly in order, the TA will record your name, the URL of your site, and the demo date in their log book, so that they can send that information to me in a controlled way when the time is right.
  4. If your site is not properly in order, your interactions with the TA must terminate. The demo is not the time for debugging or development. You will be allowed to re-demo just this one assignment until it works properly.

Due Date and Reminders

  1. Due date: Friday February 28, 2020
  2. Once you are ready, you must demo your web site for one of the TAs.
  3. Although TAs will be willing to help you by answering questions about your Web Work Site at a mutually convenient time prior to your demo, they are not authorized to do so during the demo. In other words, the demo is simply not the time for TAs to help your with debugging or developing your Web Work Site.