This is an early initiative to try and improve communications within the division, letting everyone know what is going on so we are all kept within the picture. But a web site is only as good as the information and links it contains and this is where your help is needed - to provide new content and feedback about what is already up here.
These pages are the CDSC's and it's up to you to put up anything you think fit here - it's an intranet and therefore not subject to the usual KCL guidelines regarding style, editorial policy or content. (Actually, access is currently global but there are no links to it from anywhere else and it won't be widely advertised - nor is it likely be of much interest to the world at large; access may eventually be limited to CC subnets only).
Contributing material for these pages is easy - you don't need to be an HTML wizard or graphics designer to join in the fun! Plain ASCII text will do fine and you can ask others in the CDSC to convert it to HTML if you want. Alternatively, a lot of current desktop applications now include an option to produce output in HTML format so you can, for example, use MS Word to produce pages for the CDSC intranet.
Try to stick to a fairly generic HTML (HTML 3.2 is suggested) that will look reasonably OK on a standard Windows PC or Macintosh - using non-standard IE4 language extensions or designing your pages so that they look absolutely great on a 1600x1200 X-windows system may be all very well for some but the majority will be unable to read your pages!
Once you have created your page(s) (and maybe viewed them with your favourite browser to make sure thay look OK), contact me (Andy Thomas) for the password for the CDSC account - the username is 'cdsc' by the way - and you can log-in and create your own directory before FTP-ing your new pages into it. (Full instructions on how to create your directories and where to put them will be included with the password).
If you want your pages to remain 'private' - that is, accessible only to those to whom you divulge the URL - then you need do no more. On the other hand, if you'd like to link them into the CDSC home page, then feel free to edit the main contents page yourself and include the links or, if you're uneasy about this, ask me or someone else to do it for you. Incidentally, don't worry if you make a complete mess of this - the webmaster keeps a complete back-up of all these pages anyway :-)
If you want to know more about what tools are available for HTML authoring, web page design, art and graphics, clip-art libraries, etc, Steve, myself (and Malcolm ??) will be happy to help.
the Internet Plumbers, January 16th, 1997