Web

The Web Team

The University's central web pages are maintained by the Web Team. The Web Team also provides free consultation, maintenance, design and authoring services to University departments and sections for core work, and a charged, non-profit service for non-core work.

Codes of practice/policies

All information published on the University of Aberdeen web site is subject to the following code of practice and policies:

Website Maintenance

Users are encouraged to use one of IT Services supported web content management systems - SimpleCMS or OpenText - to maintain departmental sites, and the Staff Pages CMS to maintain staff profile web pages. Please contact the Web Team for advice.

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MySQL

You can create and maintain your own MySQL databases using the utilities in this section - see www.abdn.ac.uk/local/mysql. MySQL is an ideal partner product for Web development using PHP. Self-registration is required to use the service.

PHP

If you want to develop web-based applications, one of the most popular programming languages for doing so is PHP (www.php.net). For details of how it has been implemented at the University, see www.abdn.ac.uk/local/php.

Publish your web pages

Before your web pages can be seen on the Internet, they need to be published to the University’s web service. The publishing step simply adjusts the file permissions on the pages so that the web server is able to read them. You can set these permissions yourself, or better still, use the utilities described here instead. You’ll need to provide your central login name and password to use the utilities.

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Web Surveys

Surveys at the University of Aberdeen are primarily conducted via the web. We have a site licence for SNAP professional, a useful tool for creating web surveys. SNAP is free to staff and students and can be downloaded from the Software Download Service.

If you’d like to create a survey for use at the University, please visit our dedicated web pages at
www.abdn.ac.uk/surveys.

The central web proxy service

The central Web Proxy service has two main functions. Firstly, it filters the information retrieved so that undesirable or illegal content is blocked for access. Secondly, the University subscribes to a number of web-based information resources, e.g. electronic journals and bibliographic databases. Access to several of these is restricted by location - i.e. are you connected to the campus network or not? If you are using a PC in the teaching classrooms or in your office, then you should have no difficulty accessing any of these resources; however, if you are using another Internet Service Provider (ISP), e.g. BT, Orange, Tiscali, Virgin, etc., then access can be denied to you.

The solution is to configure your home PC to use the web proxy service. You can use the service with any ISP as long as you provide your University computer username and password when prompted. Once logged in, requests for web-based resources will appear to come from the web proxy rather than from your PC, and, as the proxy is connected to the campus network, access is allowed.

For more information about the central web proxy server, including guidelines on configuring your web browser, visit our web pages at www.abdn.ac.uk/proxy.

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