Help help

or, How To Add Your Own Help Files to the Ops Page

What is it?  Where is it?

The MCC Operations Reference page (a.k.a. the MCC Operations Home Page, a.k.a. the ops page) contains a list of websites that may be useful or helpful to the MCC operator job.  Some of these websites have been created by current or former operators specifically for this purpose.  Others are external sites that an operator has found to be useful or helpful in the course of their work.  The ops page is maintained by and for the MCC operators, and any operator may add their own help to the list.  The purpose of this document is to explain how that may be done, and where you can store html files for linked websites that you own. 

The index file for the ops help page is stored in the following Unix directory:

/afs/slac.stanford.edu/www/grp/ad/op/

Inside this directory, the html document for the ops help page has the filename index.shtml.  In order to edit the ops page, and/or in order to store your own files in this directory, you must have the appropriate write privileges.  If you do not already have this, talk to Peter Schuh.  Also note that before posting anything on a SLAC web server, you should familiarize yourself with SLAC's policies and guidelines, and best practices for web authoring.

How to add your own:

A note for those who don't already know html:  If all you want to do is add a link to a pre-existing website, the following instructions should be sufficient, in concert with the numerous examples of html links already in the ops page source code.  If you would like to learn enough html to create a simple help page from scratch, read the "help with html" section first.

There are three places that operators typically store the html files that they link to the ops page.  Here is some info on each of them:

  1. Assuming that you have write priveleges for the ops' afs directory listed above, you can (if you wish) store the html documents that you are linking to the ops page in this directory.  Then you would add a line to the index.shtml file that looks like this:

    <br><a href="filename.html">Link Name</a>

    Your site will then have this web address:

    http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/ad/op/filename.html

  2. Or, you can store your documents on some other server space of your choice, and link to it from this page. For instance, in your Unix account you can create a directory called public_html. Html files stored in that directory will have web address

    http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~username/filename.html

    In that case, you would add a line to the index.shtml file that looks like this:

    <br><a href="http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~username/filename.html">Link Name</a>

    This format also applies if you just want to add a link to some external website;  it's just your standard html link.

    Remember that storing your html files in your personal directory might not be the best choice if you want your help to live on for future generations of operators after you're gone.

  3. The MCC operations group also has Windows server space, that is on the SLAC internal server.  This server is accessible from on-site or by user login only;  in other words, it is not accessible to the general public. Operators can store work-related files such as help files here, but like Unix, you must have write privileges to the folder.  If you don't already have them, Peter is the person to talk to.

    Within this space is a folder called grouponly.  Files stored in this folder have the additional distinction of being viewable only to members of the MCC operations group.  Storing a file in this folder is equivalent to setting permissions for a Unix-based file to allow read access to group members only.

    Here is how to find the operations group Windows server space:

    You might want to add this space as a mapped drive on your computer, which creates a shortcut to the drive in your My Computer folder (so that you never have to go through this again).  From My Computer (or My Network Places, or any other folder on your hard drive), go to the Tools menu, and select Map Network Drive.  Click the Browse button and click your way through to the folder according to the proceedings above, or copy and paste in the following on the Folder line:

    \\Web004\www-internal\ad\adop\

    Check the box that says "Reconnect at logon", and then Finish.  Now you can simply drag and drop your html files into this folder, and they're on the web, at this address:

    https://www-internal.slac.stanford.edu/ad/adop/filename.html

    or if you put them in the grouponly folder,

    https://www-internal.slac.stanford.edu/ad/adop/grouponly/filename.html

Help with html

If you don't know html, but you want to make a simple help document to post on the ops page, you have several options:

  1. Learn html using this tutorial from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).  It's not hard to learn the basics, and that's all you need to make a simple help page.
  2. and/or, Ask another operator for help.
  3. Or, if you really have no interest in html, but would like to post something that you've written in plain text using the word processor of your choice, then you can create a document that looks like this:

    <html><body><pre>

    all of your text here...

    </pre></body></html>

    The <pre> tag in html denotes preformatted text, so it should display your text as it appears in your word processor. Save the document with the extension .html, as in

    filename.html

    Refer back to the "how to add your own" section of this document for the details of how and where to save this file in your Unix account so that it shows up on the web, and also to link it to the ops page.  And you're done!

Last modified Sep. 5, 2005

Maintained by Robin Gold