The Digital Research Initiative
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill


Common errors.Eric/Revised- 1-3/1997
How Do I...



Common Concern #3:
"I wish to put my Web template on my Web account. How do I do that? "
Launch Fetch
Go to your public_html directory (see Fetch handout for directions)
Upload your .html pages/picture files
Remember to Set Permissions (see Fetch handout for directions)
To see how your page looks from your URL,
Check out Your Web Page, After Making All Your Changes!

Step 1 : The Macintosh can run Fetch and Netscape at the same time, so before you quit your Fetch session, check your work.
Step 2: After you have set your permissions, launch Netscape.
Step 3: Go to File and select Open Location and
Type your URL: http://www.unc.edu/~userID/filename
(Use your userID name and the name of the file you want to preview. If you don't include a filename, Netscape will look for a file called "index.html." If there is no index file in your directory, Netscape will display the list of files in that directory.)
Step 4 : As your page comes up hit Reload to see if your changes appear on the Web page.



Common Concern #1: "How can I work on my Web page templates ?"

Possible Solutions:
Put your disk in the computer.
Double click on your Disk to open up your Web templates.
Start making changes on your template without deleting the tags.

IMPORTANT: Never, never open up your Web template page from Netscape using View and Document Source command. The HTML-coded page you will see as a result of this IS NOT YOUR TEMPLATE, and will create confusion.
You will know that you are doing it wrong when...
you save your changes and you notice that the file name ends with a number such as


index.html-9867

If this happens, go to Save As and save the file as .html without the numbers.





Additional Resources to Help You With Your Web Pages:
There are scads of printed books about how to write HTML available in UNC's Ram Shop and many other bookstores. However, a good online guide to the basics is "HTML in Seven Lessons" by NCSU Systems Librarian Eric Morgan, available at <http://152.1.24.177/teaching/manuscript/1000-html.html>.
Links to many other beginning HTML tutorials are available at <http://www.devry-phx.edu/webresrc/webmstry/lrntutrl.htm>.



Common Concern #2: "I wish to see how the changes look on a Web page "
If you wish to see how your changes look on a Web page:
After you have worked on a couple of changes on your template,
Go to File and select Save.

Now launch Netscape.
While in Netscape, Go to File and select Open File.



A dialog box will ask you what you wish to open.
Go to your disk and Open the Web template file.
You should see your template in a Web page format.




Common Problems

Common Error #1: "My page does not show up."

Possible Problem: You did not upload your "index.html" file, or you uploaded it under a different name. Because UNIX is case-sensitive, your web server (Ra) treats the following as three *different filenames*: INDEX.HTML, Index.html, index.html.
Possible Solution: Use Fetch to upload your page with new revisions and make sure that the filename is "index.html."

Another Possible Problem: You did not set permissions on your "index.html" file.
Possible Solution: Use Fetch to set permissions.

Another Possible Problem: You did not upload the file to your public_html directory. You may have accidentally uploaded the file into your home directory in ISIS.
Possible Solution: Be sure to enter your public_html directory before you upload.

Another Possible Problem: You accidentally typed in the wrong URL in Netscape--don't forget the ~, or any other part of your address.
Possible Solution: Double-check or retype the URL in the location box.


Common Error #2: "The changes on my page do not show up."

Possible Problem: You made revisions on your Web template but have not uploaded the pages to your Web account.
Possible Solution: Use Fetch to upload your revised page.

Another Possible Problem: Netscape is loading a previously cached version of your page.
Possible Solution: Select Network Preferences... under the Options menu.
In the Network Preferences window, select Cache.
Click Clear Disk Cache Now button.
Click OK button after Netscape finishes clearing the disk cache.

Your pages should now show the changes.

Another Possible Problem: You did not save the changes on your disk before you re-uploaded the file you've been working on.
Possible Solution: Go back to SimpleText. From the File menu, select Save, (if Save is shadowed and unselectable, you did save your changes.) Upload the new file to your account.

Common Error #3: "My Picture Does Not Load Up"

Possible Problem: Your picture is not in the right GIF format.
Possible Solution: Use GIF Converter to reformat your picture.


Another Possible Problem: Error in filename tag for picture (such as "Gif" instead of "GIF").
Possible Solution: Make sure the picture tag is ".GIF" or ".JPEG," etc.

Another Possible Problem: Error in tag for picture: missing quote marks (").
Possible Solution: Put quote marks on both sides of the URL for your picture.

Another Possible Problem: You uploaded a TIFF file instead of a GIF file.
Possible Solution: Reformat as a GIF file and upload again.

Another Possible Problem: You uploaded the picture into root directory
instead of public_html
Solution: Use Fetch to put the picture into your public_html directory.

Another Possible Problem: Tag gives only the filename, not the full path. (This will work when viewing a page on your disk, but only works on the file server if the user puts a slash at the end of your URL.)
Solution: Use the complete URL in the tag for your picture.

Another Possible Problem: You have not properly set the permissions for the GIF file in your account.
Solution: Set the permissions for the GIF file so everyone can see it.

Another Possible Problem: In the Fetch file list, my picture filename has .bin at the end and it does not show up. "You did not upload the picture as "Raw Data" in Fetch
Possible Solution: Open up Fetch and upload your picture file in Raw Data format

Common Error #4: "There are strange characters like ANY of the following
on my page"


oe _´®†¥¨ÅÍÎÏý
Ô_ÒÒÚÚÒÒÒÒÒÒÒÒ¸
צ˜¸þÇצ˜Â¯ù¿½ÅçÃ_˜µ
¡™£¢_§¶ ªº-_¡™£¢_§¶ ªº-
oe_´®†¥¨ˆø¹"'«
ÅÍÎÏ©ÓÔ_Ò…Æ
½ÅÇæ˜Â²³÷½Ã¦˜Â³
/¤‹›Þ_‡°·‚-OE„´‰ÿÁ¨ˆØ_"'
¸þÇצ˜Â¯ù¿


OR "My HTML code/s look(s) fine in Simple Text but doesn't work."

Possible Reason: Invisible extraneous characters or "bugs" in Simple Text.

Solution: Open up your .html page in Microsoft Word and delete junk characters or extra spaces. Delete all the small square box characters; these are "invisible" to Simple Text and can appear as "junk" on the web page or can make an HTML code unreadable to the web browser, as if you had a blank space in the middle of the code. Be sure to save file in "TEXT ONLY" format when using Microsoft Word.

Another possible reason: A URL or other HTML code that is so long
that Simple Text or Word breaks it at the end of the line.
Solution: Put a line break in at a space or during the *text* part of the URL For example, in a line like
For a good time, look at <a href =
"http://ibiblio.org/uncpress/quiz/">Southern Culture quiz</a>

(It might help to press the return key after the word "at" or before the word "Southern" to keep the HTML code itself intact)

Another possible problem: Your Web page has some strange characters, such as
the play ÓHamletÓ where you typed in the play "Hamlet"

JohnÕs Page where you typed in John's Page

that is because your page has
Smart Quotes (" ") instead of dumb quotes such as (" " and/
or Smart Apostrophes (' ') in it, instead of dumb quotes such as (' ')

Solution: Netscape does not take well to smart quotes. Open the file in Simple Text, and erase all the quote marks and apostrophes and retype them in Simple Text.


Common Error #5: "My background is the wrong color or has the wrong image."

Possible Solutions:
For pix files: Use the full pathname and the correct HTML code.
.
For pre-coded color backgrounds: See these pages to find color background codes:
http://www.phoenix.net/~jacobson/rgb.html and http://www.infi.net/wwwimages/colorindex.html

The HTML coding is fairly simple. The code for setting background color follows this format:
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
This produces a page with a white background because the
color code #FFFFFF is the code for white.

 The code for setting the unvisited links color follows this format:
<body link="#00FF00">
This produces a page with blue links because the color code
#00FF00 is the code for blue.

The color codes are made up of 32-digit codes with each 2-digit code representing the amount of red, blue or green that makes up the color. The digits are not base-10 numbers, which make them look strange to most people. They are actually hexidecimal or base-16. So 10 in hexidecimal is 16 in base-10.

But it gets much easier!
When you are writing for Netscape 2.0 or higher, you do not have to know the code for the following 16 colors

aqua, black, blue, fuchsia, gray, green, lime, maroon,

navy, olive, purple, red, silver, teal, white, and yellow

When you are using these colors, you do not have to use the # sign, and all you have to do is type the color's name; for example, to make your page have a white background, you could use the code above, or you could type this:
<body bgcolor="white">

The code for setting the active link color follows this format:
<body alink="purple">

The code for setting visited link color follows this format:
<body vlink="red">

When you use these color-setting codes in your page, you have to include all of them inside of your <body> tag. For example, to have a white background, blue text, red links, purple active links and silver visited links, you would use the following code:
<body bgcolor="white" text="blue" link="red" alink="purple" vlink="silver">

Not every browser displays color the same way. For example, Netscape on Macintosh and Windows sometimes dithers colors that make up the background. The dithering pattern makes text difficult to read. A solution for this problem is to use a graphics program to create a small square image filled with the color that you want for your background. Then use Netscape's background command within the body like so:

<body background="red.gif">

Remember to place a </body> at the end of your html file.

For other cool background colors:
Go to the ColorMaker makes it easy to create colorful web pages without having to bother with confusing hexadecimal numbers:
http://www.missouri.edu/~wwwtools/colormaker/

For other texture backgrounds:
Go to the page with the background. For example:
http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/bg/backgrounds.html

USING THE BACKGROUNDS AT NETSCAPE
You can use these backgrounds directly from the NETSCAPE server. An example of the HTML would be:

<body background=
"http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/bg/fabric/gray_fabric.gif">

The URLs for each of the backgrounds are shown along with the images. The advantage of using the backgrounds directly from Netscape's server is that when your users visit a page that uses a Netscape background, the chances are very good that it will be in the cache and thus load more quickly.

When specifying a background image (with BACKGROUND) it is a good idea also to specify a background color (with BGCOLOR.) That color should be one similar to the prevailing color of the image; this ensures that if the user viewing your page has image loading off, or if your background image cannot be loaded for some reason, the page will still look close to the way you intended.

Also, if the image you specify as a background has transparent areas, the bgcolor will show through.

COPYING BACKGROUNDS

To obtain your own copy of these images, use Netscape's pop-up menu feature. Here's how:

Position the Pointer over the image
If you are on Macintosh, hold down the mouse button for about 1 second.
If you are on Windows or X/Motif just hold down the right mouse button.
This will make the popup menu appear
Choose "Save this Image as..." from the menu and voila! It's yours.

Open up your Template page and type the following tag for the background:
<body background="gray_fabric.gif or filename.gif"> to see if you like the background.
If you like the background, upload the background file through Fetch and Set Permissions.

Now open up your Template page and type the following tag for the background:
<body background="http://www.unc.edu/~jdoe/gray_fabric.gif">

Using Fetch, upload your Web template page with this tag and then you should see the page with the background.

Hit Reload if your background does not show up initially.

An alternative solution: The computer is acting very smart and forcing you to question whether you *really* think that background is worth having. After all, LYNX users can't see it and Netscape users have the option of not seeing it -- AND it slows down the loading of your page. Given all of that, does it really add anything to the page? Maybe your time would be better spent rewriting the "why I want this job" section of your resume.


Common Error #6: "Netscape says '403 Forbidden' "

The 403 Forbidden message looks something like this:

403 Forbidden
Your client does not have permission to get URL
/~userid/filename.html from this server.

If you see this message when you try to access your pages, you probably have not given the appropriate read permission for this file. You will need to use Fetch and the Set Permissions command discussed in the Fetch handout to change the file's permissions accordingly.


Common Error #7: "Netscape says '404 Not Found' "

If you get this message, it means your browser cannot locate the file. You may have typed the URL incorrectly, or you may have a problem with the file name.

Note for Windows and DOS users
Windows and DOS users have the problem that they are restricted to only three characters in the file extension, so the extension .html is shortened to .htm. To avoid this problem, at the Unix prompt create a link to the file:

ln -s page.htm page.html
This way whenever someone uses the page.html name Netscape will load the file page.htm.

Common Error #8:
You see these Icons Where Graphics Should Be

If these icons appear where your graphics should be, the graphics files referred to in the page are either not available, not saved in the correct format, or damaged.
If you see an icon with a question mark, make sure that the graphics files are in the proper directory and have the correct permissions.
If you see an icon with an image of a broken file , then Netscape has found the file but does not recognize it as the kind of file it reads. Check to be sure the files are saved in .GIF or .JPG format and that they were uploaded as Raw Data.

Common Error #9: Missing quote marks in a code like this:
<a href="http://www.unc.edu/campus/**>Campus Sites and Services</a><br>
[The stars (**) represent missing quote marks]

Common Error #10: Missing the </a> tag after a link.
<a href="http://www.unc.edu/campus/">campus Sites and Services**<br>
[The stars represent a missing </a> tag]

Common Error #11: "My picture quality is really poor!"
Solution: Re-scan picture. Remember to follow all the steps!
Another possible solution: Open your picture in PhotoShop or another good graphics program. Adjust the image's brightness and contrast. Sometimes it makes the picture look sharper.

Common Error #12: "My picture isn't where I want it to be!"
If you wish to align the picture to the right or left: You can do so by using the following tag: align=left or align=right as shown below:
<img align=left src="jdoe.gif" "HEIGHT=70 WIDTH= 50">

For some examples, please go to the page:
http://ibiblio.org/rbeckman/Remembrance/UsingPhotosWeb.html
This page by Prof. Rich Beckman outlines some solutions.
Common Error #13: "My picture is too large/too small!"
If the picture is too large or too small, you can change the size of the image by using the following tag:
<IMG SRC="jane.gif" ALT="jdoe's photo" HEIGHT=in pixels WIDTH=in pixels>
For Example: <img src="jane.gif" "HEIGHT=70 WIDTH= 50">

Before you use the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, be sure you use the right scale. Open up your picture/image file in Netscape. (Use the OPEN FILE command in the FILE menu.) In the title bar, Netscape will list the original pixel measurements in pixels of your picture. When you increase these measurements with the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags, make sure you multiply or divide the height and width pixel measurements by the same number. (For example, if I want a picture to look half as small, and its original measurements is 200 by 300 pixels, my code would like this: <img src="wonderful.gif" alt="Half as big" HEIGHT=100 WIDTH=150>)

Common Error #14: I centered some text, but all of the text below it is also centered (and I don't want that at all!).
Solution: Be sure you have inserted an "end-tag" to your beginning <center> tag.

Please note: There are several HTML tags which require a beginning and an end tag. For example, you must include a </title> if you use <title>. Below are some other examples. If you fail to use end tags, you risk the occurrence of terrible and horrible things.
Every Needs A/n Where
<html> </html> At the end of the code.
<head> </head> Right before <body>
<title> </title> Just after the title
<body> </body> Right before </html>
<center> </center> After the text you want
to be centered.
<h1> </h1> After the text you want
to be made big/small
(thru <h6>) (thru </h6>)
<ol>, <ul>, <dl> </ol>, </ul>, After the last entry in
or </dl> the list
<blockquote> </blockquote> After the text which is
to be blockquoted.
<U> </U> After the text which is
to be underlined.
&quot; and &quot; "and "
<FONT SIZE=5> and </FONT> alters typeface and size
<FONT FACE="Helv"> and </FONT>
&#169;Copyright 1996, Deb Aikat will appear as ©Copyright 1996, Deb Aikat.

®
Common Error #14: "When I open it in Netscape I get a "parent directory" list and have to click on "index.htm" to get it to come up."

Possible Solution: Your "index.html" file has not been uploaded properly.

Please upload your file again and ensure that when you upload it, the file name does not have extra spaces in......
......the front such as
"  index.html"

......the back such as "index.html  "
Notice the extra spaces before or after the word index


Common Questions with Uncommon Answers

Question #1: How do we put a counter on our page?
Answer: Use Internet Search to look for sites that offer a counter service such as the one offered at http://www.bayside.net/counter.htm
Answer: Also, UNC will give you a free counter for your page. For more information about this visit http://www.unc.edu/courses/jomc050/counter.html

Question #2: Can we copy someone else's program for one, or are there rules against that?
Answer: As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! So here are two answers:
1. If you copy HTML codes from some page and adapt some of the tips and tricks as your own, that is fine and people always do that. Not only on the Internet, but in real life, too. Perhaps, observing HTML codes or programs from other pages is the best way to learn!

2. However, you should not make an exact copy of anyone's program and I do not see why you need to do that. In other words dittoing is a no-no.

Question #3: Also--I'm having trouble getting my background to load up (so my current background is black). Third--I can't get my visited links to change color.

Answer: Please read Common Error #5: "My background is the wrong color or has the wrong image." on Page 5


Question #4: I was wondering...can we have links to whatever we want from our web page? Or, are there rules that restrict certain things?

Answer: You can link to any page on the World Wide Web and there are no restrictions to that. And you can link to the Disney home page.

Question #5: I want to have a link to the Disney homepage. Can I do this as long as I don't use a picture?

Answer: Yes you can. You can even use some official icons, such as some organizations like United Media have "Official Dilbert Link Icons"(see below) that you can use to link to the Dilbert Zone. Read about the official Dilbert Link icons at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/icon.html

These are some of the icons you can use:




Write to the Webmaster of a site of an Institution, Agency or Corporate entity to check if they have an official icons that you can put on your page as a link to their site.
Question# 4: How do I make Netscape print the URL of my page when I print my final draft?

Answer:
Go to the "FILE" menu and select "PAGE SETUP" You will see this:

Adjust the "HEADER" and "FOOTER" sections to include "LOCATION" in at least one area.

Question# 5: My links to other Web pages (such as resume.html and research.html) do not work. What is the problem?

Answer:
That is because you may be using relative pathnames. (A relative path name looks like this:<a href = "resume.html">.
Always use full pathnames for all links. (A full path name looks like this: <a href = "http://www.unc.edu/~tahughes/resume.html">

IMPORTANT: You will lose points for using relative pathnames


Question #6: Not only do some of my links not work but there are spaces in the text of my page in Netscape where I don't want them (like in the middle of wo rds.)

Answer:
When you upload the file in Fetch, you must specify the file as "Raw Data." This is done in the box which is titled "Save file on isis.unc.edu as..." This box appears just before the file is actually uploaded and looks like this:


Notice where the words "Raw Data" appear. If this is set to either "Text" or "Wrapped Text," several stray spaces may be placed in your HTML file on isis.unc.edu.

Question #7: I can't get my text or images to line up the way I want.

Answer:
If your aim is to have a picture on one side and text on the other side, you may need to create a table in HTML. Tables can help you to make a multi-columned apperance on your page. To learn how to use tables, visit the J50 tables web site at http://www.unc.edu/courses/jomc050/scratch/table.html


This site made by
eric
This site was created especially for students of the UNC School of Journalism's
JOMC 050 Class, and anyone else who may be interested.
For more information, please contactdaikat@email.unc.edu