Behind the Yellow Window

This is the "not for public consumption" side of things for CCA. There are few things of interest here:

1. How to get an account on cca-forum.org to collaborate with the fine folks in the CCA.
2. A HOWTO, if you wish to contribute to the CCA web site.
3. Pictures from the first and second climate camps that were held in the middle of 2003.

Getting an Account on cca-forum.org

1. First you have to have permission from the CCA Forum. Basically the OK from any of the membership will do.
2. You must generate a ssh public key and enter it into the cca-forum.org sign-up sheet.
3. Bug one of Ben Allan, Rob Armstrong, Tom Epperly, or David Bernholdt to take that information and make your account.

How-to contribute to the CCA web site

Checking the pages in and out of the CVS repository

The Web pages are stored in a CVS repository. If you have an account at cca-forum.org, you can check them out of the repo as follows:

$ cvs -d /cvs/web-2004 co web-2004

After that, you have to run the post_checkout.sh to create some symlinks (CVS does not support symlinks):

$ cd web-2004
$ ./post_checkout.sh

The TEST pages (reachable at http://www.cca-forum.org/test ) are *not* in CVS. Instead, just hop into /home/httpd/test-web-2004 and experiment in there directly. Since the configuration of blosxom (the "engine" that produces the CCA web pages) is sometimes a little obscure, I strongly recommend that you use the test pages if you are planning to touch any blosxom configuration file.

In order to make the modifications available, after you update the main pages in the repo, you will have to:

$ cd /home/httpd/web-2004
$ cvs update
$ ./post_checkout.sh

Two quick things before we begin

The web pages are located in the /web-2004/blosxom-tree directory (except for the images, which are in /web-2004/figs-and-docs/). There are two important things to keep in mind:

• Documents are stored as ".txt" files. The first line in this file is the title (in plain ASCCI, without HTML markers). The rest is plain text with HTML for formatting and linking. This is true for any page (the "News" pages as well as the "regular" pages).
• Anything that is not a ".txt" file is a blosxom configuration file (this includes any ".html" or ".htm" files that you see around). Don't touch these unless you know what you are doing.

Posting News

you can post news to the system by creating a file in blosxom-tree/News/ (or under a subdirectory in there, if you wish to post the news in a particular category).

The file must be named YYMMDD_whatever.txt (note the ".txt" extension). The YYMMDD part is the current date. It important to follow this naming convention for the scripts to work correctly. In particular, the "post_checkout.sh" script mentioned above, sets the unix "modification date" of the file to YYMMDD. Blosxom uses the modification date to display the date of news and to order them.

The file is a simple ASCII file with optional HTML for formatting. The first line of the file is the title of the post (don't put any HTML in that line, just text). For example, this is a complete news-posting file:

  The new CCA Web Pages

  <p>
  The CCA web pages have been reworked. Please send any broken links
  or bugs to the <a href="mailto:webmaster@cca-forum.org">webmaster</a>.
  </p>

  <p>
  So far, news can be posted by members with access to the web
  source files. This is done by copying a plain text file with
  extension .txt under the directory "News". The first line of the
  file is the title of the news. HTML markers can be used.
  </p>

Also, any image or external file must be placed in a separate directory because the /News/ directory is not directly visible from the web. The place to put images and external documents is /web-2004/figs-and-docs/..., which is reachable at http://www.cca-forum.org/db/... (or /test/db/ if you are using the test pages). For example, check out how the image was included in the Bodega Bay Meeting page:

  CCA Fall 2004 Meeting, Bodega Bay, CA (21-22 Oct 2004)

  <br>
  <img src="/db/Meetings/CA-04-10-21/harbor.gif"
   alt="Bay Photo" height="161" width="347">

  <h2 class=substorytitle>Meeting Registration:</h2>

  <ul>
  <li>LLNL's Registration Page: 
  [<a href="https://www.llnl.gov/car/meetings/cca_forum/register">click here</a>]
  </li>
  <li>No Reg Fee</li>
  <li>Deadlines: Non-US Citizens should register before Sept 8</li>
  </ul>

Blosxom "config" files

By default, blosxom will display all ".txt" files in any given directory and all the subdirectories when you access that directory page. In some circumstances (for example when you access the root of the directory tree), this is not desired. To override this behavior, and set other configuration parameters, in a directory basis, you can place a config file in that directory. For example, the following config file is at the root of the CCA web pages tree:

  package blosxom; # required

  # --- Configurable variables -----

  # How many entries should I show on the home page?
  $num_entries = 1;
  $blosxom::flavour = "html";

In other circumstances you want all the .txt files displayed. This is the case, for example, of the "News" section, in which you want to display the news of all the categories in a single page.

Adding Regular Pages

Regular pages are added in the same way as "News" postings. The only difference is that the configuration is set so that Blosxom will display them differently. For example, they don't have a "DATE" header.

Modifying the Menus

The stuff surrounding the main area (the "CCA" title, the navigation bar and the menus on the left) are stored in the /web-2004/blosxom-tree/head.html file. The ".html" extension means that this "head" file will be used for "html" decorations. In other words, when you ask for "myfile.html", Blosxom will look for "myfile.txt" and decorate it with the stuff in "head.html".

It is possible to have other flavors. For example if you ask for "myfile.xyz", Blosxom will look for "myfile.txt" and "head.xyz". And use that header for the decoration. Althoug it sounds simple enough, flavours are very powerful, and they can be used to achieve all kind of things. It is very easy to break things if you fiddle with flavors, so I don't recommend it unless you are a Blosxom expert.

For simple stuff, such as adding a link to the "Quick Links" menu, go ahead and edit the "head.html" file. Note that there is a separate "head.html" file for the SciDAC web in /web-2004/blosxom-tree/SciDAC.