Building and Maintaining your Web site
Web server quotas
Quotas for data storage on the BSS Web server (bss.sfsu.edu) are as follows:
- All new and current accounts are allocated up to 500MB of storage space. Examples of accounts:
- Accounts already in excess of that limit (as of January 31, 2005) may not exceed a hard limit of 1GB storage.
For assistance in managing file locations or file sizes, please contact BSS Computing Director Andrew Roderick at roderick@sfsu.edu to request a consultation and/or training session.
Posting Word and PDF documents
- Posting documents in Word, Excel and PDF format is a simple way to make them available to students through the Web. All BSS and SFSU computers (both Mac and PC) can successfully download or print out these files. To upload these files, click "File : Import" in Dreamweaver or Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. Remember to import the file again whenever you modify your original version.
- File security: no one can modify your online documents without direct access to (and authoring permissions on) your web folder. Although Word documents appear as though they are editable online, users may not save any changes to the server.
- To create PDFs from Word, Excel, or other documents, click "File : Print" and choose Adobe Acrobat (or PDF95) as your printer. When you hit "Print," you will create a new file. This process must be repeated every time you update the original document.
- Non-standard fonts will not appear correctly for some users. If you are using non-standard fonts, you must create PDFs with embedded fonts. Check the print options when creating your PDF files.
- ERes, the Electronic Reserve System at San Francisco State University, is online here. To send a request to materials online through this system, e-mail the ERes manager, ereserve@sfsu.edu.
Online Course Syllabi Procedures (for Departments and Faculty)
We have discovered that many departments in the college have begun to place course syllabi on their websites in an effort to reduce copy costs, save paper, and provide convenient access for students. In an effort to help streamline the process of making syllabi available on the Web for students, we provide these recommendations and guidelines to ensure the process is efficient and effective.
Given that most faculty already have their original versions of syllabi in Microsoft Word, we recommend that this version of the files are simply placed on the web. Most current web browsers can now open up MS Word documents within the browser window, much like an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, so student users can easily open and print these documents from the Web.
It is important to understand that the MS Word documents cannot be changed online. Anyone can save the document to their computer and edit their personal copy of the document, but the document which is online can only be edited or deleted by the department website administrator.
What Departments Need To Do
To make syllabi available to students, departments will need to create one web page within their department website, which will contain the links to each of the appropriate syllabi. We recommend the text for the links contains the course ID, section number and faculty member's name. BSS Computing is available for help with this.
What Faculty Need To Do
All syllabi should be:
• emailed to department website administrators as a Microsoft Word attachment
• emailed to department website administrators as an Adobe Acrobat PDF attachment
(This requires Adobe Acrobat Writer software and an extra step to convert the Word Document.)
• posted on a faculty member's personal website and linked-to from the department website
In the case that a faculty member cannot provide a syllabus as a file, nothing will be posted for that course or instructor. Physically scanning in documents is time-consuming, technical, and produces larger, low-quality files, which take a long time to download.
Posting Additional Materials
If professors desire to have any additional materials available online, they may:
- begin a personal website on the BSS server (Instructions here)
- E-mail the Manager of Electronic Reserves at the SFSU Library at mereserve@sfsu.edu to arrange for the provision of copyrighted articles and readings online.
Andrew Roderick
Director and Web Support
Office: HSS 385
415.338.6116
roderick@sfsu.edu