Chapter 1: The Global Recipe
Traditional cookbooks don’t bother giving you the order in which the different courses of a meal should be served. Eating a sweet dessert after a savory main course seems obvious because it is what we have learned from childhood. On the other hand, the order in which to perform tasks when establishing your information server is far from obvious. You need a global recipe that orders the recipes for each course.
This chapter introduces the steps you need to follow for establishing a fully functional Internet information server, and Figure 1-1 summarizes the steps even further. From top to bottom, each box in Figure 1-1 lists a specific step in the process. The numbers in the boxes represent the chapters in which each step is covered. The types of information we will encounter are shown on the left of the boxes and the types of software tools on the right.
Fig. 1-1 The Global Recipe
This book considers the three most common types of Internet information service in use today--anonymous ftp, listservers, and Web-based services using the http protocol. To reach the widest possible audience, you should support all three types of service, although your needs may be met by one or two.
- Anonymous ftp (file transfer protocol) is efficient at file transfer and available to a wide audience.
- A listserver is a convenient way to broadcast e-mail messages to a list of subscribers who may not have any other service.
- A Web server delivers text, graphics, and other multimedia forms as well as supporting more complex interactions between a user and an information server. The server can, for example, perform some complex calculation. Gopher is considered to have been superseded by Web-based services and is not discussed.
We learned the hard way that you should follow the global recipe steps in the order given to get the best results when installing and maintaining these services. We recommend that you follow these steps as well. Let’s look at the definition of each of these steps.
1. Planning--First you have to decide who your audience is and, then, what information you are going to provide to your audience, and how you will provide it. Supporting sound and video, for example, require additional server software and also will place heavy demands on your server. Planning will help you address these sorts of potential downfalls and make informed software choices from the available programs for each of the servers--ftp, listserver, and Web.
A good server with lots of information also provides multiple ways for finding information (we call these "entry points"). During the planning process, we shall explore ways of providing useful entry points. The most direct way is providing the equivalent of an index. You will need to decide (a) whether to provide an index and (b) what tools to use to generate, maintain, and browse that index.
By far, the most important piece of planning for an Internet server is getting Internet access. We shall consider briefly how to obtain Internet access if you do not already have access, and how to manage it on your Mac OS machine once you are connected. In planning an information server, you also need to consider the demands it will place on a computer. The most immediate concern is likely to be sufficient disk space to store all the information. If your server becomes popular, you need to ensure that memory, file transfers, network bandwidth, and, to a lesser extent, processor power don’t limit the rate at which you can serve information. We shall consider what these demands are and when in the development cycle they are likely to occur.
2. Getting On-line--A basic ftp and listserver each require a single piece of software and take a few minutes to set up (plus the time to set up mailing lists and to organize files for transfer). Installing a Web-based server requires one or several pieces of software, depending on the types of information you want to serve.
In this book, we will discuss the options (yes, there are quite a few Mac OS options) from commercial software, shareware, and freeware for each type of server. We will show you how to install and configure NetPresenz, a shareware ftp server. Among Listservers, we will cover AutoShare and Macjordomo, popular Listservers for Mac OS platforms. We will also install and configure two Web servers, the commercial WebSTAR and the freeware Quid Pro Quo. Finally, you may also want to provide an index to the information on your server. We will show you how to install and configure Phantom and SearchServer, which include a gatherer, indexer, and search engine.
3. Staying On-line--Running a Web server, from any computer, requires that you practice safe computing. For the most part, this involves the same tasks that you already know you should be doing for your computer--backups, disk management, security, and virus protection, for example--but that you’ve been putting off. Particularly if you’re running a commercial site for your business, you need to start doing them. Other tasks include gathering access statistics, anticpating future needs, and monitoring error logs and usage of system resources. We will cover some of the available tools to help you with these jobs.
4. Digging In--With the planning done and suitable hardware and software selected, you are ready to start building your information server. First, you need to install the client components of all the software for which you will provide the server components. You will be the first to use your server to test whether the server functions as expected and the information is presented the way you want. We briefly discuss installing client software components, including a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, or CyberDog, that you are likely to need. As is true of all discussions in this book, we will make good use of reference material available on the Internet.
5. Organizing the Menu--How you organize the various types of information on your server becomes important as the amount of information grows. The tricks are to (a) avoid duplication, (b) provide easy file retrieval, and (c) provide a suitable path for growth as your Internet server evolves. Yes, this requires more planning. (Sound familiar?)
This is perhaps the most critical part of the whole book! How you organize the information so it is accessible, readable, useful, and easily maintainable is paramount. Anyone can provide a server with little effort--even if it doesn’t appear so from what we’ve said so far; however, the usability and value to the intended audience of the server requires work.
6. Web Recipes--Creating the information you want to serve could take a couple of hours to several months, depending on the complexity of the information being served. For this step, you need a different set of tools. For basic Web pages, you might choose to use Simple Text to write HTML files from scratch or use HTML and graphics editors and format converters to turn existing documents into HTML. If you are going to provide sound and video, you will need tools for producing, editing, and browsing these formats.
Servers range from support of simple text and graphics pages with limited links to a large server that joins a hybrid of databases and various file types. We will cover the latest in Web technology, including clickable maps, server side includes, Java applets, and HTML frames. We will dissect information organization on a couple of real and imaginary servers to see what makes them tick.
7. Epilogue--Internet information servers involve rapidly changing technology and you need to keep abreast of developments that may effect your server. We will point you to some interesting sources of information on these developments, and, of course, give you some thoughts of our own.
