Introducing Your kinetic Service Web Site

Revised: January 31, 2012

Contents

• Overview
• Visiting Your Web Site in a Web Browser
• Viewing Your Web Site with an FTP Client
• Search Engine
• Reports
• Server Side Include and Custom Headers/Footers
• Web Access Controller
• FormMail

Overview

Each new kinetic service web site is configured with default files, directories, MOREnet-provide web applications, a search engine, activity reports and other tools. This document introduces these items for content managers and new customers of the kinetic service.

Important: Your website is hosted on a UNIX server where the / (forward slash) character is used to separate directory and file names. This notation is typically used in FTP clients to show directory paths and is used within this document for the same purpose.

Visiting Your Web Site in a Web Browser

After notification that your site is ready by MOREnet staff, you can begin working with your new web site. Replace {your-domain-name} in the URL below with the domain name provided by MOREnet to visit your web site and view the sample content:

http://{your-domain-name}/

When you first visit your web site in a browser, you'll see sample content that was created with items of interest for various audiences your site may have. This sample content includes several directories and files that you can modify:

• http://{your-domain-name}/index.shtml
  A default index page for the web site. You may remove it or modify it as needed.
• http://{your-domain-name}/search.shtml
  A sample search page. You may delete this file, but beforehand ensure that have integrated the search form into another web page so that visitors can search your site. For more information, see the Search Engine documentation.
• http://{your-domain-name}/robots.txt
  A basic robots.txt file. You may alter, modify, or remove this file as needed.
• site.css
  A basic starter cascading stylesheet page. You may alter, modify, or remove this file as needed.
• kS-resources.shtml
  A page which lists links to useful kinetic Service Resource Web Site information.
• /custom/ Directory
  A directory which contains a set of starter headers and footers which are used by the WAC and the reporting pages to give a common appearance for your site. The web pages you create can use these as well. Use of the /custom/ directory and the files within it is optional. These files and this directory may be removed if preferred.

Viewing Your Web Site with an FTP Client

To view the directories and files of your web site with FTP, use the FTP client of your choice to login with your kinetic service e-mail address and password. Specify ftp.kinetic.more.net for the Host Name/Address option in your FTP client. For more information about configuring an FTP client, see Publishing to Your kinetic Service Web Site with FTP.

When you first login, a /WebPublish directory (folder) is displayed in your client. This directory provides a view to one or more web sites that your account has permission to modify. If your account does not have web publishing permissions to a site, the /WebPublish directory is empty. If your account has web publishing permissions, you can open the /WebPublish directory and it will display a subdirectory for each web site; the subdirectory names match the domain names of the sites. Each of these subdirectories group together all of the different directories relevant to a web site: the pages, the logs, the reports, etc. Open one of these directories to view the site's contents; this directory is considered the root directory of the web site. It contains several supporting directories for the site, including the /www directory that serves as the root directory for web site content. The /www directory is the only directory of interest to most web publishers since it is where publishers put content for the web site.

Important: Web site content begins in the /www directory. Other directories at the same level as /www provide supporting content and services. For more information about these, see Web Site File Guidelines and Directory Structure.

Search Engine

A GoogleMini™ search engine is automatically configured to index your site and provide the search mechanism for site visitors. The default /www/search.shtml file contains a sample search form. For more information, see the information provided in the Search Engine documentation.

Reports

MOREnet provides reports for every kinetic service domain. For example, web server logs for your site are analyzed for daily, weekly, and monthly site statistics, as well as monthly page view reports. These reports can help you learn how visitors are using your web site. See Reports for more information.

Server Side Include and Custom Headers/Footers

Server Side Include is a feature provided by the web server that allows you to place special commands in your web pages so that dynamic content is automatically added to pages by the web server. This feature is most often used to easily create a consistent appearance across a site by including common elements within pages, such as headers and footers, as well as automatically inserting information such as the last modification date. The default header and footer shown consistently across your sample web site's Reports and WAC pages are created using this functionality. See Server Side Includes and Custom Headers/Footers documentation for more information.

Web Access Controller

This tool allows you to password protect areas of your web site. This application is also used by the Calendar for restricting administrative areas of the application. For more information, see the Web Access Controller documentation.

FormMail

Matt's FormMail is a popular, common, and stable web site utility for taking web form submissions online and turning them into an email which is delivered to an assigned email address within your organization.

MOREnet provides a version of this script for use by all web sites hosted within the kinetic Service. The version made available is the same as the current Matt's Script Archive FormMail version 1.91, with one exception. MOREnet has adapted this script to work for delivery to any account hosted within kinetic Service by using a unique ID code for each account. Since each email account is referenced by a unique ID, this has the added benefit of further reducing opportunities for e-mail address harvesting by spammers. For more information, see the kSFormMail documentation.