lynkali

Strangely, I just had a similar problem on my domain. Two or three of my directories were suddenly set to permissions 750, but I had not touched anything. (And yes, I got the permission denied error on my web browser.) The most mysterious thing is that when I first viewed the File Manager on cPanel, I saw "750" as permissions. After looking at a different directory and coming back to public_html, the permissions had reset themselves back to 755 and all was working again. I didn't do ANYTHING, other than look. That's very disconcerting, but it does seem okay now! Is someone at TCH resetting permissions behind the scenes?

Having recently redesigned my site, I added the EntropySearch box on some of the pages where I thought it would be useful, especially on my 404 page. As much as I like the idea, I'm not entirely happy with the results, and I was wondering if anyone had any insight or suggestions (modification or installing a different CGI search function) that might solve these problems: (1) I have a lot of pages in German, with special characters (e.g. umlauts or ß). When I search on Präpositionen, it should return about 20 results, but it says 0. Is this because I'm on a Mac and it's not transliterating to HTML characters correctly, or can EntropySearch not handle high-end ascii? Either way, I would really like to find a search function that can return correct results when searching with special characters. (2) EntropySearch seems to fail if more than a certain number of characters are searched on. I haven't quite tracked the problem down, but an example: I have several pages with the title "Kein Schwein ruft mich an". If I search on any of the first four words, alone or in succession ("kein schwein ruft mich"), I get the correct results. But if I search on the entire phrase ("kein schwein ruft mich an") I get 0 results! Yikes. Obvioulsy visitors looking for that phrase (it's a song title and I actually get a lot of hits for it from Google) are going to be unhappy. Similarly, searching on "Lenz der Hofmeister" returns 0 results, even though I have a handful of pages that talk about "Lenz" and "der Hofmeister" together. Is EntropySearch that restrictive? (3) Since numbers (1) and (2) seem to be inherent to EntropySearch, can anyone suggest a different CGI search function that I could install? I know next to nothing about scripting, having just copied bits of PHP here and there, and I've never done anything with Perl, but I think I could figure out a basic installed module if it comes with documentation. I wouldn't even mind paying a small amount if it's really worthwhile. I've seen mention of PSLightningSearch, but reading their User Guide I can't tell whether there will be any problems with German umlauted letters, since it doesn't seem to talk about any special character issues. Subdomain searching isn't a problem for me either way (I have a subdomain but don't use it for anything important), so that's not a criterion that matters to me. Customizing results would be nice, but as long as (1) and (2) above are solved, I'd be happy with almost any design. I'd rather not go with a Google search, although many of my pages are Google-indexed, I'm adding new stuff all the time and would like a search function that doesn't rely on Google or other offsite indexers. Any help would be appreciated!

Tracy -- that's a very good idea, and I've changed the sidebar links to have Course Pages as a separate header. (They also open in a new window now.) That makes more sense, as you said, but still preserves the links which I want there -- because a lot of my students just enter my domain name when they want to go their class page, so I needed direct links to help them out. Thanks so much for the suggestion! Thumbs Up

Lisa - thanks so much for the speed optimization link. I'll see what I can do to slim things down a bit, though at least that report is saying it isn't quite as horrible as I thought it might be. Natimage -- you're absolutely right about both comments. The German (101-102-etc) pages are my course homepages designed for my students, and I'm not really sure that I want my students directed right back at my home page. (I have no problem with them viewing it, I just want the course pages to focus on the course material.) There are links (buried in a ways) back to the home site, but maybe I'll move them to the front, I'm not sure. As far as the expandable tables go, I actually chose them that way -- I thought it would be a waste of space on a large monitor to have a tiny 600-px-width text area. I debated about it for a while (it's actually easier to code the fixed width table and make it blend nicely, the variable width gave me some problems at first), but I went with variable. Do others think I should go back to fixed width? If I do, it just leaves so much white space on the right side (if you're at anything larger than 800x600, which I think most of us are). Thanks to both of you for the comments! Glad to see there aren't any really awful problems with the site.

Well, I've been with TCH over a year now but only now have found time to massively redesign my pages. So I'd very much appreciate a link on the TCH Family page, as well as any comments anyone has to make on the look, layout or content of my pages. Site: http://www.nthuleen.com/ Name: Nancy Thuleen (it's a personal site with subsections) Description: A resource for German teachers and learners, with dozens (hundreds?) of German-language grammar and vocabulary worksheets, as well as my own essays and articles on German Literature and other topics. Doubles as my personal homepage and has sections for the classes I teach each semester. TCH link, in text and image, is on the front page. Rank Evaluation: sure, if anyone has time or energy. I've just moved a bunch of things around, so right now my Page Rank isn't showing on the new URLs, but for many of my older pages, I had a PR of 5 or 6, which surprised me because I've never done any advertising or soliciting of backlinks. (My essay page is listed in DMOZ, which obviously helps. I'm planning on submitting my teaching resources page there, too.) A question regarding moving things around: because some of my pages (e.g. /essayindex.html) aren't there anymore (it had a PR of 6), I've set up a 301 permanent redirect to point that to the new page (/write.html). I assume Google will eventually catch on and update the page rank? Or do I need to contact all of the sites who link to essayindex.html and get them to update their links? (I'll probably notify a few of the larger sites even if I don't need to.) Other notes: I do code all my pages by hand (BBEdit on a Mac) and make my own graphics, but I do try to test them on Virtual PC and other machines when I get the chance, but I'd very much appreciate any comments from users with browsers that I don't have (e.g. other than Mac browsers and PC IE6). I'm also a bit worried about the load times, since the titlebar graphics are a little on the large side. I'm on a cable modem and I don't notice any load time, but I do worry for dial-up users. Should I try to reduce the quality of the titlebar logo to make it smaller? Thanks in advance, and if I haven't said it before, it's not for lack of thinking it: TCH rocks! Rock Sign

I also use a Mac under OS 9 and code by hand using BBEdit. I don't do a whole lot with subdomains -- I've only set up one subdomain and used it for some miscellaneous small things. But I'm really not understanding the problem here. For me, my subdomain (fire.nthuleen.com) is just a folder called "fire" in the top level of my public_html directory. So on my hard drive, I have a "web pages" folder, and inside that a folder called "fire" -- inside "fire" is the index.html page that comes up when I access fire.nthuleen.com. But each individual page and folder just has the short name, like "fire" or "index.html" -- not fire.nthuleen.com or whatever it is you're doing. The dotted names are only used in the actual URL in the browser, at least the way I do things. In short, I never run into the 31-character limit because I just use folders. I then upload to my public_html directory using Interarchy, and all is fine. (I hardly ever use CP except to manage account features, so maybe you're trying to do something I'm unfamiliar with.) Really, a subdomain is just a folder, and it's up to Apache to redirect the subdomain to the folder, right? So keeping folder names on your hard drive seems to make perfect sense to me. Maybe I'm not helping, because I really have no idea what a sub-sub-domain would even be. I have directories inside my subdomain (e.g. fire.nthuleen.com/fire/images), but the slash is needed, there's no way to get there without a directory signifier. That probably didn't help, but it's what I do, anyway.

Well, it's solved now. It was the doctype causing problems -- evidently my old host had Apache configured differently, but TCH was sending out headers based on the doctype -- which I still had as html 4.0 transitional. Once I changed that, everything's back the way it should be. It wasn't the propagation, evidently, or at least it doesn't seem to have been. But all the nameservers have propagated now, so I guess I can't be sure it wasn't that. Thanks for your help, both of you!

Thanks for testing it. It still doesn't work on mine (it's the very first php element, so it should be getting called right away before anything else). I don't use includes, so it's not that, either. About the only thing left is the nameservers, which haven't propagated yet. At this point I'll wait until they propagate so I can access the proper domain name -- if it still doesn't work then, well, then I'll have to figure something out. At least it works for you, so I know I'll eventually get it solved. Thanks!

I just signed up with TCH, and in transferring my pages over from my old host, one of my PHP scripts seems to have broken. I need to ensure that my students see a fresh page of homework listings when they access the homework page each day (long story short, most students connect through the university servers, which cache old copies for an excessively long time). So I include this in each homework.php page: ><?php header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); header("Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT"); header("Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"); header("Pragma: no-cache"); ?> Which effectively flushes and prevents all caching of those pages. This has worked perfectly before, on my old host (evil Featureprice), and if possible I'd like to keep it working at TCH. But now, when I access that page, I get the php warning: >Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php:8) in /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php on line 10 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php:8) in /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php on line 11 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php:8) in /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php on line 12 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php:8) in /home/nthulee/public_html/102/hausaufgaben.php on line 13 Can I not modify header info at TCH? If not, yikes. If that's not it, is it possible that it's merely because my name servers haven't propagated yet? I'm accessing the pages via the temporary IP-based URL -- once propagation occurs, might this work? Or am I out of luck? Any other ways to prevent cached files?