Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Live Update Web Pages on Linux?
Mike
wonders about the following issue:
"I am working on development of a Linux hosted web server
that will allow users to edit their own web spaces. I
realize that there is FTP for file/web-page management
purposes, but for many of my users, this would be a
disaster, since they don't understand the in's & out's of
managing a site thru FTP. Are there some kind of
extensions for Apache (or any other Linux-based servers)
that allow me to do live & in-place editing?"
I wonder if something like this is necessary with the
difficulty of FTP becoming less of an issue with the better
of the graphical clients out there. It allows users to use
better Web Development tools on their own machines as well.
What do you all think?
Running frontpage under Unix is very very unsecure...I've seen several boxes get rooted that way...
With CGIs with Perl (or C or C++, it doesn't matter), it's very easy to do that kind of stuff...
Check out http://www.cgi-resources.com/
You're a friggin idiot. Should you have to know how to swap out an engine to drive a car? Should you have to know network topology to use a phone?
Keep thinking that way and you'll be (forcefully) retired before you know it.
(finally I _feel_ like an Anonymous Coward)
Is perl .. aka, a CGI script that new? I remember making scripts that would read from plain text files way way back when i was just a youngin.
Then I remember making backend sites where input in data fields would write text files that would provide content for the webpage.
......
Yeah, my college's main page got "renovated" by some little punks when we ran frontpage on our Sun. I believe Netscape still offers "Fasttrask" a pretty neat http server. It allows all the admin duties to be performed by browser, and even supports the one-button "publish" fuction from netscape's WYSIWYG HTML editor. Fastrack used to come with caldera, I'm not sure if it still does. Might be just what you're looking for. Also, the folks at www.altima.org are doing something similar to what you want, chek out their site.
WebDAV looks pretty cool, at least you can run it under SSL/https. I can't believe so many folks are still maintaining sites remotely with FTP. Can't believe there aren't more cracks b/c of plaintext admin & authoring access...
Yes, I've noticed this sort of thing happening far
too often lately. What I refer to is the helplessness
of modern newbies when it comes to figuring out
something as simple as an FTP client. What is so
hard about uploading via FTP? Or, what is so hard
about it that someone couldn't teach themselves
(without asking bumbling idiotic questions) how in
about 5 minutes? I have noticed this increasing
trend, and honestly I'm getting tired of it.
KDE will prompt for the password, and then open a window that works basically just like a window on a local directory. Drag and drop files between the local system and the remote system.
Most definitely... this was the first thing that I thought of. There is a Squeak based Wiki called Swiki. You can download it for free.
Start looking at:
http://www.squeak.org
Pretty cool.
]{evin
I tried to do what you describe. .html files, but it's very confusing for a computer-illiterate user
the problem is that many WISYWG editors running on Windows will have some troubles with the links.
Editors like Frontpage will assume that you're referencing a file for a server hosted on the computer you're using, and will use some kind of weird reference to all the files relatively to their windows path (I think it would be something like "//dir_mounted/dir/file.html", correct me if I'm wrong, but whatever it is, the HTML page which is generated will have all the internal links broken)
It's not a big deal, you can fix that by manually editing the
Sometimes for people on a WebTV, or maybe behind a firewall that blocks ftp(like at my school).
How does your friend compose his web pages? That's what I want to know.
I so dearly want to move our internal web site away from FrontPage. Every time our "web designer" uses FrontPage she royally fucks up all my forms and sometimes our server-parsed HTML. But she is never going to be able to live without some sort of GUI HTML composition tool.
What does your friend use? Please elaborate. Spill the beans!
Your SSI comments must have a space before the closing '-->'. If they do, FrontPage won't obliterate them. Otherwise, FrontPage will. - a disgruntled FrontPage server admin user who wants to switch to Zope.
There's a patch available to add an option to preserve permissions without having to run as root.
see subject
pico.
Was that quote by Rizzo or Agnew?
micros~1 version works well with homesite. But use homesite 3, NOT homesite 4. Homesite 4 is too tied in to ms-html. Homesite 3 is a decent text/html editor.
Dreamweaver 2 and Homesite 3
you might look at xfiles
- GPL'd, it shows a graphical file tree and compares/diffs/copies/deletes files between a client and a java server program. The client and server can be different processors or OS's.
No security at present. Editing would be trivial to add however - html display and text editing are both pre-provided widgets in the java JFC.
"This of course was for a mac campus, so asking them to do FTP was a little bit too much."
What maks ftp an more difficult for mac users than windows or linux folks? Mac users have a variiety or exceptional gui/ftp tools: Fetch, Anarchie, Net Presenz, etc... All are drag and drop enabled, so moving files back and forth between my local drive and my network account..
What I find interesting about this comment is that this is not a Mac network.. It's a Windows/Unix network, within which a few of us happily use our unsupported Macs. Most, like 90%, of the undergraduate students, and a few of the graduate students, I deal with on a regular basis (all windows users) don't know that their windows boxes can ftp files from the command line... In fact most wouldn't know that FTP even existed if they didn't occasionally hit a site with an "ftp://.." address.
Don't give me this ftp is too much for a Mac user.. We're just as bright and capable of comprehending mind bending concepts like FTP as the linux, or windows, folks.
Yes, but the point here I think is to make it very simple for users to do. And, as we all know, for some reason when people have to use a command line on a computer, they start to shake and get scared. Also, not everyone uses unix, they may have a mac or windows box.
Geoffeg
Typical boneheaded Linux nut response. Bravo. You've accomplished nothing.
Wow. All I do are NT web apps with Oracle. Rock solid. Lightning fast. Sounds like you guys needed a bit of training. Sorry, by MYSQL doesn't come close to Oracle's performance. It's closer to MS Access.
Wow. Agreed. His web page is a total piece of shit. It's really laughable. I'm posting it right now to a web developer's user as a worst case scenario. Wow.
No, it wasn't. Responses like that go a long way toward explaining why Linux has a 5% desktop market share.
actually, PFE allows you to save files in "Unix Format", it's in the Save As dialog. I use PFE to edit scripts on a windows box and save them via samba directly to the web server. Everything works fine.
Try explaining this to your boss who wants it done yesterday. You report to him with political bull like that, you dont have a job. BE CONSTRUCTIVE!
If you let new Web team members onto your team without them understanding what an SSI or a server-parsed html page is then that's part of the problem.
Samba is great, but in real-life situations where machines are sitting in a DMZ that option may not be available. FTP works and is simple enough with tools like WS_FTP and all the WYSIWYG editors that support FTP. Cron is a wonderful sysutil.
Whatever happened to the concept of staging and production machines? You let someone edit content straight on production? That's asking for trouble regardless of what skill level you are. How may times did you forget to chmod stuff in the cgi-bin once it had been edited and uploaded?
People shouldn't need to do "save as" in order to be able to edit the file, it should either be local on a staging or backup machine where they can edit by opening it in their favourite editor.
I did see one before for Linux that was a "GeoCities" type deal.. It used java to allow users to select the files and upload them, and had a "Page Editor" built right into some pages. I believe I got it off of FreshMeat, But I don't remember the name of it anymore. I believe that's basically what yer lookin for :)
Just an FYI... Zope (http://www.zope.org) has not only Undo (as 20 people have already mentioned), but also the concept of "sessions" (now called Versions), where you can modify the site without anyone else seeing the changes... then other people can "join" the version, see it, you can commit it incrementally, etc... all while the rest fo the world sees it "untouched".
:-)
Why stage, when you can do it live?
AOLServer is availiable for linux, and supports http put using AOLPress and Netscape Communicator.
Pretty neat server, it scales, and it's free (but not open source)
www.aolserver.com
Actually for strictly .html files there are no problems with it. However for allowing cgi/perl programs that are /*run*/ on the server it will not allow the file to be written correctly since Windows programs write a file with hard cr's in the file which unix doesn't like in its scripts.
Hidden Syntax
Although I cannot point to any hard evidence off the top of my head, SMB file sharing is known to be a fairly insecure protocol. I would not advise anyone to put up a Samba server on the internet without first looking seriously into the sevurity concerns. I think the best example is Microsoft themselves who used to allow SMB access to their ftp site, but have stopped the service due to security and stabilbility problems.
-pete
Peter Daly
pdaly@usa.net
You might want to take a look at WebRFM, available from
7 772/webrfm.html
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/
It supports WebDAV (and can be used with M$ Web Folders) along side having a more traditional form
based interface.
I got hassled into installing frontpage extensions on our Solaris/apache1.2.6 web server about a year ago. The users really like it as it gives them a lot of creative power. The downside is that it is a *really_dirty_hack*. The docs look pretty but they bear no resemblance to the actual installation procedure, they are *CHALLENGING* to install. Our webmaster now wants me to add some new "sub-webs" for more user groups. I ran the fpsvadmin program to show him how cryptic it is and asked him if he wanted to take responsibility to our Intranet to be down for a day if we mis-understood the completely un-documented software. He backed out faster than I would!
If you can get away with it DON'T INSTALL FP as it is a cancer that will keep webmasters and users on your back to restore pages thay have killed and to change the structure of the web. The security is completely non-existant. Stay away from it, it is rubbish, users love it, but your admin time will increase enormously and your security will dissappear.
Peter
Yeah, but well... I began working on this with the rule of not using any Java or Javascript at all to maintain compability with for example Lynx and other browsers. And also Java in any form sucks so... :-)
I am making a web based file manager you might want to look at. It is pretty extensive already. New stuff being added as we speak. http://www.edlund.org/projects/drall/
A while ago my Quake clan was in need of a webpage; however, some people were HTML/CGI illiterate. I wrote a cgi program utilizing the now obsolete cgi-lib.pl. The program would be called thru a form in a locked directory (accomplished via .htaccess). The program would lock the file to be edited (which was selected via a form on the page), and then present you with it to be edited. The editing page was just a large textarea. A Preview button and a submit button were placed under it for finishing the job.
Still, people were complaining they didn't know HTML. They only wanted to update the news page. So I simplified it for a goddamned monkey. All I did was had all the fields that the news update required (topic,updater,updater's email,news submission). It then opened a temp file, and copied line for line from the old file. When it came to just above the old news, it placed the submission above it. It then continued writing the rest of the file. Then the files were unlocked and switched. The temp file gets deleted. Job done.
This was my first decent cgi/perl program. I'm sure you could write one in under a few hours. Mine took me under 100 lines of code. Really inefficient little hack-job.
Good luck to ya.
I have dabbled with the FrontPage extensions, and I must say that I have never seen a more horrid hack. Not only are the insecure, but just not implimented well. A good idea that went VERY wrong.
Uhm, Frontpage won't obliterate SHTML tags. If the server has Apache frontpage extensions installed or WebDav (for frontpage 2000)... the file will be sent to the user as-is with now server processing done whatsoever.
You pull down an SHTML page in Frontpage, the tags will remain in the HTML and appear as comments. Unless you delete them.. they will still remain when you save the file to the server.
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
First there is of course CVS from http://www.cyclic.com. CVS isn't just for source code you know. It provides all that's needed to do complete web site management between a number of webmasters at once. It keeps a copy of every revision of every file, giving you access to it in case you change something by mistake. Other control systems like Aegis and RCS are equally usable.
:)
There are MS Frontpage Extentions from http://www.rtr.com for Apache. These automate common tasks such as access controls, simple CGI. Frontpage, even thought it is a Microsoft product, isn't that bad of a program. It provides a fairly good UI for WYSIWYG editing of web pages along with a file manager resembling Microsoft Explorer. Frontpage 2000 will also feature a way to directly access your web pages from Microsoft Explorer via Network Neighborhood... which is pretty cool.
There is WebDAV from http://www.webdav.org for Apache. WebDAV is the "standard" extensions for Apache for web site editing. All your favorite programs should be using it in the future including Frontpage 2000, Dreamweaver (unconfirmed.. but hinted at), etc. It is currently supported by IE5's little editor dealy as well as a few simple clients for Unix.
More and more webmasters are having to conceed to using a WYSIWYG editor, as well they should. Web standards today are not exactly the simple tags they used to be. You have CSS, XML, XSL, HTML 4 with their complex box algorithms and silly incompatibilities between web browsers which make WYSIWYG programs very attractive. WYSIWYG editors have their place, don't dismiss them simply because the common-folk use them as well.
Then again, don't abandon source editing altogether, nothing beats a text editor when you need a quick fix
--
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Posted by darthvader:
hope those perl scripts werk better then that login does
Posted by pboddie:
I haven't had the same stability problems as you
seem to have had with Zope's built-in Python Web
server, and I'm running the "old" 1.10.2 release
with ZopeHTTPServer. This is on Solaris 2.6,
though. There's always ZServer with the later
releases.
If they just have to edit the pages them selves, teaching 'em a simple GUI ftp proggy (for graphics) and give 'em a HTML editor that can save to FTP sites. BBEdit does for MacOS, and I'm sure there's a few for windows as well.
Doesn't Netscape Composer pretty much let you do this? It's got a WYSIWYG editor, and then you_ html (or whatever directory you've set up), then put in your username and password, and it will upload the page, and all the associated files. Is that pretty much what you are looking for?
click on the publish button, which from there you would put in ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/home/users/username/public
I was thinking the same thing, most WYSWYG editors do that, including Frontpage, and Dreamweaver (personal favorite because the source generated is actually readable).
I understand that people should be able to publish their ideas freely, but they had to learn to read before they could write, why shouldn't they have to learn how simple things like this work before they can publish their ideas?
Frankly, I'm getting rather tired with the commoditizing of, what 10 years ago, was either a hobby, or a profession. Frankly, I find it disgusting that as of late jsut about anyone with not a single iota of background can walk in and demand, that something that others spend years working with to learn fix or make easier for them.
At least you have to take a common sense test before they give you a drivers license.
-Erik-
I have dabbled with the FrontPage extensions, and I must say that I have never seen a more horrid hack. Not only are the insecure, but just not implimented well. A good idea that went VERY wrong.
Hehe, that's hilarious.... A job I had a while back had 4 MC*'s (2 MCSE, 2 MCP) and none of them would allow either IIS/NT serving, or Frontpage extensions on the Linux servers, but they'd plug M$ whereever they would go....
Capitalists are hilarious.
-Erik-
Zope can handle large volumes -- see their page on case studies -- several online newspapers use it on a commercial basis for high volume/high traffic situations.
They also have a chat board product (with threaded discussions) that you can plug in. Zope also has an indexing facility built-in that automatically gives you a search capability.
As for editing, Zope has just implemented WebDAV which allows for distributed authoring and versioning. You can try webdav editing with IE 5.0 and Zope to see if this fulfills your needs.
You manage the entire website with just a browser 99.99% of the time, so you don't have to worry about deploying client software.
It also has an ACL like hierarchy based user access/security interface so you can fine tune the capabilities that you give your users to access or modify your data.
As for converting your back issue articles, it maybe just possible to use ftp to transfer all your back-issue html files into zope. Zope has a builtin ftp server that can be used to transfer files between your ftpclient and the webserver's internal object database.
If this is not what you want, you can probably create a program to do that for you. Its all open source, so the code is available for your modifications.
It also has a dynamic community of Zope advocates that are very helpful in bringing newbies up to speed. They have an active mailing list you can join.
In terms of commercial support, Zope is backed by a commercial company, Digital Creations, who originally created the software as proprietary closed source and saw the light, turned it into open source. If you want commercial support or do it quickly you can hire those guys.
Now, the negatives (not entirely). Zope uses a scripting language named DTML (document markup template language) -- it's like HTML which is easy enough to learn but also subtle enough that it can take a while to become an expert in. Also, while not required, it would help a lot if you know Python, because that's what its written in.
I would urge you to try it out or at least check out the web site( www.zope.org) because I'm certainly impressed by it and all the people I know who started using it are also mightily impressed by it.
Look at the DAV extensions to Apache. The only sad thing is the best GUI client for DAV right now comes with IE 5.0.... ;-)
sigs are a waste of space
What you want is ssh. The cleartext authentication
mechanisms of telnet and ftp are too insecure.
The users should develop the web site on their local hard drive and then simply synchronize files with some secure transfer like ``scp -R my_dir me@website.com:public_html''
That gives you the most flexibility. You can
version control all your stuff locally, test it
carefully, etc.
The web server is just a place where you showcase
a snapshot of your work. It's not where the work
should be taking place. That's just fundamentally
dumb.
1) It's in Python. Ack. I *want* to like Python, but there are just too many factors keeping me from affording any time to it. I'm still a Perl Monger.
You are right to be afraid -- once you spend the half hour needed to know Python well, you'll never want to look at Perl again.
I'm joking, of course. Perl is a cool language, and you'll never stop using it now that you know it -- however, you'll find that text processing is actually NOT the best way to do everything. Including CGI.
2) Major control needed over the server, which sucks when you don't own the server and have no possible say over configuration. Most commonly, Perl and *maybe* a database are available to me. Installing Python, and web server extensions is verboten.
Then Zope is forever off-limits to you. I'm sorry.
On the other hand, perhaps it might be worth your while to appeal to your ISP (whom _you_ are paying to provide a service) and convince them to add what is a very minor and highly useful program.
3) It's all dynamic. No static publishing of pages which are, for the majority of the time, static. Granted there's a cache, but can that be as fast as spitting an HTML file instance of a content object into the web doc root and letting Apahe serve it up?
Zope is *highly* optimized, and if there's a fast way to do something it'll do it. All of the bottlenecks are written in C, thanks to Python's extensibility.
It's a pretty sophisticated program; don't underestimate it.
And no, it's unlikely that a static page would be served faster -- although that would have to depend on your machine, your bandwidth, and the hit rate (and your OS). If Zope's not running your stuff fast enough, going to static pages might provide a speedup over some of that domain -- but then, it might not.
I've been working on what's partially a "clone" of Zope, in that it has much of the same functionality, written in Perl.
I'd say you're wasting your time -- but of course, I don't really believe that. I wish you luck.
You're not going to be able to match Zope, though; Python doesn't have CPAN, but it does have a HUGE number of useful scripts for a huge number of purposes. Zope has ACL security, transaction-level undo and redo, highly optimized code, and a solid support community.
Oh, and you don't have to learn Python to use it -- but you will, you will. Once you've seen what Python can do so easily, there's no way you'll remain satisfied with the Old Way of doing things.
-Billy
Ah. I see the problem. "Selling" Zope to them might sound like fun from the outside, but whew... :-)
That's why the feature to publish static pages via file system or FTP upload is attractive to me, since I might not even have to install a Web Application Server (mine or Zope) on a remote server. Just install one here and use it as a development machine, and have static updates rolled automatically to the client's machines.
Well... Okay, here's the scoop. Separate publishing is a major goal for Zope, meaning that it'll be coming along very soon (we're working on WebDAV in the current version). I don't have any idea on when and how, since I don't follow the mailing list.
Well, I'm hoping that, once I complete the first revision's batch of features and release it open source that I can attract some fellow Perl Mongers to waste time with me. :)
Good luck -- it's quite likely that you'll succeed.
And good luck to all of us if you do -- I'm seriously afraid that having two competing products in this new niche will jeapordize both. I'm probably just paranoid, and aside from that worry I'm excited about your project -- quite aside from my puzzlement about why you're redoing all that work in the first place.
Well, from what limited experience I have with Python, I like it. But my time is limited, and I don't want to devote time to mastering another language for just one product (i.e. Zope) when I have skill in Perl and use it every day. THen again, maybe after an attempt at matching that one product, I'll find that further time might be better spent with Python.
Python is great, but in all my work with Zope I haven't so much as seen a single line of Python code. Why should I? Don't shun Zope because you're afraid of learning Python -- Zope won't force you to learn Python.
-Billy
Ah. I see the problem. "Selling" Zope to them might sound like fun from the outside, but whew... :-)
That's why the feature to publish static pages via file system or FTP upload is attractive to me, since I might not even have to install a Web Application Server (mine or Zope) on a remote server. Just install one here and use it as a development machine, and have static updates rolled automatically to the client's machines.
Well... Okay, here's the scoop. Separate publishing is a major goal for Zope, meaning that it'll be coming along very soon (we're working on WebDAV in the current version). I don't have any idea on when and how, since I don't follow the mailing list.
Well, I'm hoping that, once I complete the first revision's batch of features and release it open source that I can attract some fellow Perl Mongers to waste time with me. :)
Good luck -- it's quite likely that you'll succeed.
And good luck to all of us if you do -- I'm seriously afraid that having two competing products in this new niche will jeapordize both. I'm probably just paranoid, and aside from that worry I'm excited about your project -- quite aside from my puzzlement about why you're redoing all that work in the first place.
Well, from what limited experience I have with Python, I like it. But my time is limited, and I don't want to devote time to mastering another language for just one product (i.e. Zope) when I have skill in Perl and use it every day. THen again, maybe after an attempt at matching that one product, I'll find that further time might be better spent with Python.
Python is great, but in all my work with Zope I haven't so much as seen a single line of Python code. Why should I? Don't shun Zope because you're afraid of learning Python -- Zope won't force you to learn Python.
But I want to learn the hard way for now. :) Anyone else interested?
No, but can I be your arch-enemy? ;-)
Really, though, good luck. And whatever you do, PLEASE study the competition before you release! I've seen far too many inferior products crowd out good ones, to both ones' demise.
-Billy
At www.zope.org, you'll find a complete system to do exactly that, complete with transaction-based undo (that is, anything you can do you can undo later, without having to undo anything else if you don't want to) and access-control-list based security. It's open source.
It has database support, and there are modules to handle slashdot-like forums ("Confera"), WebDAV, and many other things. Its default interface (when not using webDAV) is simply HTML -- you can administer (and add content to) your pages from any web browser which supports passwords, frames, and forms.
It's trivial to install, and the default package is essentially a trial (it stes itself up on another port to not get in your way), so it's harmless to play with before you commit. It's a breeze to use, but almost frighteningly powerful.
I'm an experimental sort, so I never learned HTML well enough to make a page look good. Because of Zope, though (and a little help from CSS), my web page was able to inherit the look and feel of my friend's web page, and automatically change when he changed his. So now I provide the technical design, and he makes the site look good -- and there have NEVER been any maintainance headaches, and we both know that if someday there were it wouldn't matter because we could always 'undo' the problem.
Get it. Learn it. Live it. Zope.
-Billy
The FrontPage extensions are not quite in-place editing, but are often demanded by users such as you describe who also use FrontPage for editing their website.
Be forewarned that there is a lot of concern over how secure the current binary-only implementation is, though.
Couldn't you accoplish this, or pretty close, by using Telnet and a menu driven restricted shell?
;-)
Just give them access to a curses based file manager, and a text editor, or something similar? Just a thought.
Topher
If it's a fairly secure network, use Samba/Netatalk. Have the lemmings map a network drive and edit the files with whatever GUI (nominally)HTML editor they have.
They'll love being able to just save files on to the web server and all but the very dumbest will eventually get how links work.
If it's insecure then use FTP and recommend some GUI ftp client to them, DON'T use frontpage, it's *incredibly* insecure.
Deleted
Actually, I've set up a similar configuration with netatalk, so the users could edit their files with standard apple filesharing. This of course was for a mac campus, so asking them to do FTP was a little bit too much.
--mere mortal--
Zope was actually created just for this purpose. It was created by a newspaper company for newspaper companies. Infi.net owned Digital Creations at one time. Infi.net was a web hosting service started by an owner of multiple newspapers to host the web sites for the newspapers that they owned. Infi.net started Digital Creations to develop solution to host their newspapers.
So as you can see Zope was created to manage the content of these newspaper companies.
Oliver
I was thinking ange-ftp myself
I use it to maintain several web sites, and one of the servers has a public login for people to try it out:
login: guest
pass: <html>
Don't upload warez to the site!
If you want the source code just email me and I'll give you the latest set of Perl scripts and the installer script. Just don't redistribute it.
Ja.
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
I use it to maintain several web sites, and one of the servers has a public login for people to try it out:
Don't upload warez to the site!If you want the source code just email me and I'll give you the latest set of Perl scripts and the installer script. Just don't redistribute it.
Ja.
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
sorry about that extra post, I was trying to get less then and greater then signs to show up and accidentally hit submit instead of preview. If you can't figure it out the password is the leading html tag in an html document.
Ick, what a way to mention your html editor when you can't even generate readable html in your post. I'm going back to bed.
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
I'd have to agree here. Dreamweaver is probably the best GUI HTML editor you're going to find. I'm especially fond of it because it comes with BBEdit, which is one of the best text editors on the Mac.
And as we all know, BBEdit doesn't suck.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think it is necessary. Have you sat and watched newbies attempt to get something up on the web? We are all so used to file structures, HTML goodness, the niceties of networks and everything else required to get working pages from our computer to a server that we forget they are starting from scratch. These are people that break out when faced with saving a file and finding it again from Windows Wordpad. They are the ones that Microsoft included that Most Recently Used Documents pop up a few dozen pixels above the Start button for.
I've watched (and helped) friends get stuff up on Geocities, and they are quite happy to use that frames based JavaScript page builder thing. Some have even graduated to typing their own HTML into the forms based page editor that Geocities makes available. But they have yet to master getting files from here to there. The concept of editing a page on their own machine and then uploading it is still foreign to them. So simple web based tools are necessary and useful to get the neophytes started on one of the things that makes the internet such a revolution in communication, the ability to self publish.
In so many words, yes, it is necessary.
Bleh!
You might want to take a look at Zope.
http://www.zope.org
Zope uses "persistent CGI" which means there are a couple of Zope processes running that handle incoming requests rather than having to restart python over and over.
Beware : Netscape Composer have the bad habit of using literal link (i.e. "C:\website\img\image.gif" instead of "/img/image.gif") like many other WYSIWYG editor. Take care with this one.
:wq
web-dav (web distributed authoring and versioning) is a good first place to check, i think with the appropriate apache module it supports in-place page locking and editing via msie 5. if your user community is semi literate, you might also look into cvs to manage web development, which is easier and more effective imho. HTH
about sean dreilinger
Please, don't do it!
Don't allow your people to edit live pages - they never know who is going to load that mis-edited page they haven't debugged yet!
web pages should be tested out of the public web arena, then merged in when - and only when - they have been finished.
Intosi
Intosi
In-place editing is not such a great idea. One editing error can screw up your whole production web site. When I was asked to help a non-savvy friend with her web site, I set her up with FTP Explorer. It looks and works just like Windows explorer. I helped her type in the URL and password, and then I explained: Save your files from word in folder X on your computer. Then open FTP Explorer, and drag all the files into your WWW folder. She's been cruising merrily ever since.
/home/httpd via NFS (since my server and workstation are both Linux) so it acts just like home! (I wouldn't recommend this for the Internet if security is a major concern, or for a production server with newbie users).
On the other hand, for my intranet server, I just mounted
Anyway, good luck!
Vince
Linux help for beginners to advanced users: Control-Escape.com
This is actually how I admin my personal website now. I must say that it's one of the most friendly ways that I've ever seen, and you can make it pretty secure (allow/deny in smb.conf, for example). I use a text editor (PFE for Windows), and save my files in a share that's mapped to a local drive. It works quite well.
Again, like the other posters have said, it will break scripts unless you ask Samba to do CR/LF translation, which will break pix. But then, if users are wanting to use scripts, they're probably bright enough (or should at least understand how they should be) to use FTP. I mean, letting users install scripts without having them know even basic Unix is a little extreme in the "luser empowerment" movement.
If they're on Windows clients, using Samba will make their day a lot easier. Just edit the files "locally", and they "magically" appear on the website (provided that you set-up permanent shares on the Windows client).
I don't know about FrontPage working in this setup or not, but you really don't want FP extensions on your website. That would be a Bad Thing.
The following sentence is true.
The previous sentence is false.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
True, true.... There's just no way to set it as default, so I tend to forget.... :)
The following sentence is true.
The previous sentence is false.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Dreamweaver, by Macromedia, is a surprisingly good
wysiwyg html editor. The code it outputs is relatively clean, and the interface is pretty good. I still write it myself, but, were I going to use a tool, it would be Dreamweaver
NewsTrolls uses it and it's clear and no FTP...
Gossamer Threads' File Manager
--diva
diva Pasty Drone NewsTrolls, Inc.
Ack... been looking at Zope, and I really like what it can do, but I've got a few snags with it.
1) It's in Python. Ack. I *want* to like Python, but there are just too many factors keeping me from affording any time to it. I'm still a Perl Monger.
2) Major control needed over the server, which sucks when you don't own the server and have no possible say over configuration. Most commonly, Perl and *maybe* a database are available to me. Installing Python, and web server extensions is verboten.
3) It's all dynamic. No static publishing of pages which are, for the majority of the time, static. Granted there's a cache, but can that be as fast as spitting an HTML file instance of a content object into the web doc root and letting Apahe serve it up?
I've been working on what's partially a "clone" of Zope, in that it has much of the same functionality, written in Perl.
Beyond being a clone, I'm also working on scheduled static publishing features. And publishing can mean writing a static file to the web server path, or uploading to a remote FTP server.
And, being in Perl, I want to leverage the whole of CPAN behind making a library of content classes. (i.e. POP3 enabled objects, IRC objects, FInger objects, whatever)
I'm also working on making it mod_perl friendly so that, when you are using it to serve up dynamic objects it shifts from static pages to a mod_perl accellerated server.
Basically, when I'm done, I want a system that's flexible enough to fit many scenarios. You can have it on your home linux box as a dev site, FTP'ing updates automatically to Mom&Pop's ISP. You can have it on a whip ass Apache/mod_perl server providing published static and dynamic content.
Why all the trouble? Ninjacode.com. We want to put together a Webmonkey-like site, but maintained and written entirely by the community. Delegate editorial control of certain sections to trusted people, allow article submission by anyone, allow peer-review of CGI scripts through SlashDot-like forums, etc so forth... and all administered via web.
Anyway... I'm done babbling. Just want to see if anyone's interested in my project, or if anyone can give me really good reasons to learn Python and stop reinventing the wheel..
I'm joking, of course. Perl is a cool language, and you'll never stop using it now that you know it -- however, you'll find that text processing is actually NOT the best way to do everything. Including CGI.
:) (Just kidding).
:) I work in the Interactive department of an ad agency, and we create the content and programming for web sites hosted by our clients' MIS departments.
:( But maybe caching static pages will make up for it somewhat.
:)
:)
:) Anyone else interested?
Hmm... but I like writing things like s/$!$*..$%$#/#$@/xcvb and having it do cool things.
Then Zope is forever off-limits to you. I'm sorry.
On the other hand, perhaps it might be worth your while to appeal to your ISP (whom _you_ are paying to provide a service) and convince them to add what is a very minor and highly useful program.
Unfortunately, the owners of servers where I work are not hired by us. We're hired by them.
That's why the feature to publish static pages via file system or FTP upload is attractive to me, since I might not even have to install a Web Application Server (mine or Zope) on a remote server. Just install one here and use it as a development machine, and have static updates rolled automatically to the client's machines.
Zope is *highly* optimized, and if there's a fast way to do something it'll do it. All of the bottlenecks are written in C, thanks to Python's extensibility.
And no, it's unlikely that a static page would be served faster
That's the gist I'm getting so far... And unless I can recruit people to the project who can do those optimisations for me, looks like I will fall behind in performance.
I'd say you're wasting your time -- but of course, I don't really believe that. I wish you luck.
Well, I'm hoping that, once I complete the first revision's batch of features and release it open source that I can attract some fellow Perl Mongers to waste time with me.
You're not going to be able to match Zope, though; Python doesn't have CPAN, but it does have a HUGE number of useful scripts for a huge number of purposes. Zope has ACL security, transaction-level undo and redo, highly optimized code, and a solid support community.
So far, I have the versioning of objects to do transactions, have access control, but not the optimization or the community. HOping the community will come, and from there the optimizations and support. But maybe I'm too optimistic about the 'Build it and they will come' concept.
Oh, and you don't have to learn Python to use it -- but you will, you will. Once you've seen what Python can do so easily, there's no way
you'll remain satisfied with the Old Way of doing things.
Well, from what limited experience I have with Python, I like it. But my time is limited, and I don't want to devote time to mastering another language for just one product (i.e. Zope) when I have skill in Perl and use it every day. THen again, maybe after an attempt at matching that one product, I'll find that further time might be better spent with Python.
But I want to learn the hard way for now.
Well, Xoom's case is the little different -- normally, an FTP server throws a non-anonymous user into the users's home directory by default. For Xoom, the home directory would be the user's web directory, but normally they are two separate things. Besides, even if the FTP client is nice, it's another client to learn.
Look, an optimistic estimate would be that 99.9% of all web pages suck. That's pretty much a given. Why do they suck? Because people who don't know anything about human interface design, HTML standards, accessibility, and are often color-blind and respond only to blinking lights and shiny objects (thus explaining the popularity of animated GIFs and the BLINK tag).
The U.S. Gov't has recently mandated that all gov't and contractor web pages be accessible, striking a blow for a usable Web.
We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it.
Make 'em use FTP and vi and the W3C specification like real designers do. Ban Sams.Net's alleged books. Make 'em pass a certified site design course *AND* have their pages pass validator.w3.org and Bobby before their page can be viewed by anyone else. Imprison the inventor of animated GIFs.
We can have a decent, readable Web, or we can have point-and-drool "Information Superhighway Publishing Made Easy In 12 Minutes, Unlimited Edition!"
Ah, so you're an Infernal Exploder luser? Congratulations, you're a victim, just like everyone else who subjects themselves to that crap, and especially to ActiveVirus! Did you reformat your HD, at least? What kind of fool admits to using MSIE on /., anyway?
Go on, then, critique my web site. What "horrid" feature of it don't you like:
I just checked usage stats for my site - last month, 5152 sites made 9249 visits and received 13219 pages and files (excluding sounds and images). And that's to a PERSONAL HOME PAGE. You didn't even have the balls to link your own page in. What do you get, 1 hit a month?
I looked over at your work site, www.jyster.com, and I feel sorry for any customers you victimize... and I didn't even experience it in its full shockwave suckiness.
_ _______________
--- jyster.com ---
[LINK]
[EMBED] You need a browser that supports Netscape plugins or ActiveX
controls to view this page.
if you see a broken puzzle piece above, click here to get the plugin.
click here after the Shockwave installer has completed. You do not
need to restart your browser.
_________________________________________________
--- 1032 ---
Just shoot your computer, your cow-orkers, and yourself now, and get it over with, for the good of the Web. Yeesh.
Somebody is bound to start working on a GTK implementation...
I just thought of something else:
:)
Right from the start, Xoom used FTP. Even though it's tough for newbies, they *will learn* how to do it. Xoom's been around for a while and they have a lot of clueless people with webpages on the server.
æeee!
There are ways to allow browsers to upload files as part of a form submission. As well, your server can be configured to support HTTP PUT commands to certain directories w/authentication.
:)
I don't have any good references on the above, but that should be a start.
æeee!
I've seen a lot more servers get rooted that didn't have FrontPage extensions installed. So maybe FrontPage extensions are actually improving server security.
Anecdotal evidence sure is fun...
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Too bad the "FM" for FTP doesn't list more modern and easier methods to do what the questioner wants to accomplish. WebDAV is much superior to FTP for these purposes, but if you enjoy hangin' with the dinosaurs with your beloved FTP mastery (har har), I won't stand in your way.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
You could do it with samba, the users would save their files to a network drive like usual (in w98 and NT you can map sambashares using ip instead of wins names). It would also be easy to set up the right create masks to get the permissions right.
Im sure there is a lot of reasons for this not being a good idea, in that case please enlighten me cause I was thinking of setting up something like this
Vlinto is being used for a variety of uses from a geocities like site to corporate file sharing. It's commercial though. (waits for the reader to finish rolling his/her eyes)
If you are wanting an Apache extension/module... I think WebDAV is better, although I haven't used it (yet).
http://customcgi.net/vlinto/
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
The Midnight Commander, swiss knife of Linux filemanagement "mc", will do the ftp for you and show the contents of the remote site in one of its panels.
If your customers can navigate the Windows FileExplorer, then they will have no problems whatsoever with mc.
send + more == money?
Telnet and vi. Wasn't that easy?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Many neophyte web designers will download the current webpage via http, modify it in FrontPage (which produces microshaft's typical, horrible HTML anyway) and then plaster it over the original via Samba, drag-and-drop FTP, or some other mechanism.
.html files, not .shtml files (and certainly don't let them save HTML over a CGI, but that would never happen, right?). Even then, use of microshaft tools will cause quite surprising page bloat, especially when tables are involved.
All server-side includes, variable, macros, conditional text directives, and just about anything else interesting in the original, before-processing, dynamic HTML file is OBLITERATED. The budding webdesigner doesn't even realize anything is being lost as the original dynamic page is replaced with a static one.
I've seen this happen in several places, different users, etc. It's critical to either:
1) Make sure they're editing the original file with all the tags, includes, etc., visible, or
2) Hide everything behind a cgi-based editing/submission system so they -can't- mangle special parts, or
3) Only let them edit
Another common problem is when symlinks are replaced with normal files in the update process (the enduser usually doesn't even know what symlinks are, and Samba doesn't show them as being different from files and directories either) This can confuse the people who knew what the symlinks were for, and worse, break scripts that depended on them.
Have fun....
...let's make sure we start making authors of trashy novels and comic books adhere to standards of good written English (of course it has to be English so that it's 'readable' by most people). Of course, we can also make sure there's a minimum level of proficiency required to disseminate any printed text, in order to insure that ALL brochures, books, booklets, leaflets, magazines, newspapers, etc. meet YOUR standards, asshole!!!
You want 'decent' content on the Web?
Make some.
You don't want to see 'non-decent'/'non-readable' content on the Web?
Close your eyes or stay the fuck offline!
Flame me.
chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
Another thing I forgot to mention, it will let you go to a webpage, and hit file and then edit, which opens it up in Netscape Composer, which is also pretty convenient.
Doesn't Netscape Composer pretty much let you do this? It's got a WYSIWYG editor, and then you click on the publish button, which from there you would put in ftp://ftp.mydomain.com/home/users/username/public_ html (or whatever directory you've set up), then put in your username and password, and it will upload the page, and all the associated files.
Is that pretty much what you are looking for?
Is this extremely slow and memory-intensive?
The developers of PHP3 say it's better than CGI scripts (under Apache and with mod_php3), because the mod_php3 module is loaded into memory only once. When you call a PHP3 page, on a server running mod_php3, it doesn't have to spend the time loading the interpreter, nor does it have to waste the memory loading multiple copies of the interpreter.
I'm not trying to say PHP3 is better; on the contrary, Zope's features look VERY cool. But how does it get around this "problem"?
Ryan
Hey, I've been looking around at different options for managing an online newspaper, and Zope seems pretty promising, but I was wondering if anybody could give me their opinion of its suitability. Basically, we need to update a large number of articles daily, keep some features rolling continuously, maybe add a chat board, and do some searching. But my big concern is the difficulty of moving existing HTML back issues (several hundred issues and thus many thousands of articles) to Zope. Would this be really tough?
Thanks a lot!
it's in Python!
CJK
If all the pages you put up through the interface should have the same basic format, you might want to look at what /. itself is doing. I've been working with database driven perl code and HTML pages for a few months now and find this approach to be the easiest. All the editing can be done right from your browser, and you can use the file upload feature to upload graphic files (See the CGI.pm documentation to find out about support ing this).
I don't have a clue how well Zope handles large loads but as far as functionality goes, anything you can do with Python you can do with Zope.
The last place I worked, we hosted some commercial sites for Real Estate Salespeople and other computer-illiterate types.
Using PHP, we had a simple template where they could upload pictures of their properties they were selling, add prices, descriptions, etc. I no longer work there, and did not part on the best of terms, so I no longer have access to the code - or I would gladly share.
I know it was not too much to write it though. PHP is relatively easy to learn.
Don't throw your computer out the window, throw the Windows out of your computer!
Hi
) as it allows editing and creation of web pages on-line via a form interface. However it's only any good for pople who know a bit of HTML.
If the users know HTML then Gossamer-Threads FileMan script is handy solution for this (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/fileman/
Chris
Check out MKDoc a mod_perl CMS
Now I don't mind making FTP easier, I quite like IE5's ftp interface, and I long for the day when I can map an ftp site as a directory, but this dumbing down of the web IMHO is a bad move.
Errr.... you can do this with the GNU Midnight Commander under linux... you can create a shortcut on the desktop to an FTP site and it looks and feels like a directory... I think.... it's either that or KDE that I'm thinking of, but it works with one of them. Either way, drag and drop, in-place editing, deletion, etc... all work with it.
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
Homesite can be located at www.allaire.com. I've used it a bit, reasonably impressed with it. I tend to use HTML editors to get the basic code laid out, then hit it with vi or jed (usually vi these days, jed is iffy on an AIX console). A guy I work with uses Homesite extensively, and is very impressed with the latest version - it has CSS editors, syntax colouring for javascript, perl, html and more. There is a 30 day trial, then it costs money.
-- Sapere aude.
Slow in the making ;), but very interesting, is what I found at Openportal. If this could be supported in both generation 5 browsers, I think most form-based approaches are likely to be very cumbersome in comparison with this. And for real page uploads and remote website management, I'm hoping Netscape will support WebDav also in v5.
Oooh, one can only hope for real standards compliance...
Your favorite editor, Emacs, has a really good HTML mode and can load / save files transparently through ftp, just by typing the ftp URL when opening a file. Even file-name completion works just as if the file had been local.
tred@f+N0SPAM+3d.net
I think you can figure it out, just remove the +nospam+ :). I'll get you in touch with him if neccisary.
- tred
I know that you have been told about many other application servers by now. But there is another one that you might find interesting - Midgard.
Midgard is built over the foundation of PHP3, MySQL and Apache, and works on the ideology that there will be no normal files on the server but rather that all the queries are validated with a database table containing instructions on what to do with incoming URLs.
It is actually easy to create good-looking and effective web-based interfaces with this. I've done it with a few sites, and even normal sales personnel and school people have been able to create content to their pages.
So if you are interested, check Midgard out at http://midgard.greywolves.org. The system is under LGPL, and came publicly available just last night.
I like the system, but then again, it can be said that I have bias...
--
Midgard Project - Open Source CMS
I don't see what the big deal is about FTP. There are plenty of easy to use GUI clients.
/.? ...must be a decent idea!
One problem that might come out of letting folks edit their webspaces directly on the server is that the quality of their pages will slip. The quicker and easier something is to do, the more likely it is that someone will do it poorly.
I do believe that clueless people are entitled to their own sites. Freedom is important. Instead of maintaining their active files directly, you could let users play with a safe copy-- either on their local machines or on a secure part of your sever. Then, after the user has taken a GOOD LOOK at everything and VERIFIED that they have created something that is decent and clueful, apply their changes to what's on the server.
Hey-- isn't that how comment posting works at
I've done it this way with my personal site for years. I keep an exact copy of the site at home (on a windows box, so shoot me!) and mess with it all night long until it looks good, and only THEN do I FTP everything to the university server. If you replace "FTP" with "click the Big Red Button(tm)" my grandma could do it.
http://c2.com/w2/wiki/WardCunningham
r gPatterns
http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki
http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/O
FASTRACK?! NEAT?!
Fast track for responsible for putting me off hosting under UNIX. That program bites. It was less stable than IIS under NT, it shut itself down at least twice a day, and it's not like it was dealing with load either, say about 250 hits an hour. It sucks *BIG TIME* :)
And don't get me started on WYSIWYG editors *spit*
OK this is a rant, because my brother in law wants to setup a web site of pictures of my nephew *grin* and AOLs web interface is horrible!
Call me a throw back if you will (they do at work because I use EditPad for all my web coding needs *grin*, unless I'm doing ISAPI stuff, Visual C++ yummy) but ever since the spread of WYSIWYG editors (FrontPage, Netscape's built in job, Hotdog, Dreamweaver et al) the standard of HTML on the web has gone to hell.
Now I know I'm guilty of writing dire HTML ( my home page sucks), but most of the time it's viewable in pretty much everything (ah the kludges to get stylesheets working cross browser, thanks Netscape)
It's all very well people putting up pages, but the lack of understanding on whats underneath is getting inexcusable.
In one of my last projects a government agency wanted to use FrontPage to keep a 10,000 page web site up to date, because they didn't want to learn HTML. Heck it's not difficult, and by hand coding you get smaller, nicer, more portable HTML.
Now I don't mind making FTP easier, I quite like IE5's ftp interface, and I long for the day when I can map an ftp site as a directory, but this dumbing down of the web IMHO is a bad move.
Of course this could be because my job involves writing web sites! OK I'm going back to bed *rofl*
It's interesting.
A several paragraph rant regarding how most webpages suck, yet your own website is utterly horrid.
It's amazing the number of hypocrites in the world...
~Rorschach
P.S.: That wonderful "virus alert" sound got a great laugh from most of my friends. Extra-lame, indeed.
I'm currently working on a project called SCREEM - Site Creating & Editing EnvironMent - for Gnome/Linux. At the moment there's just an alpha version of the source available, but we should have a new website and beta release available soon. Probably doesn't have all the features you want, but see what you think... http://www.idaho2.demon.co.uk
insignificant sig
I have been experimenting with Zope on two systems. I love the management capabilities of it (all you need is a web browser). I have one interfaced to a mysql database for searching info, and there has been only one problem to date, the python web server it ships with seemes to shut down randomly (crash perhaps, but see no error in logs) and gobbles up memory.
/Zope/ in order to access the pages. (in other words, wish it to act as a normal web server).
I strongly suggest using ZAP (Zope Apache Server, or configure your apache server for the task) since it will start python with a CGI script. I have yet to have a crash, and even simulating one with a "killall python" and connecting back up to the server, apache will restart the cgi in a few seconds.
One other word of advice, edit the apache start script where:
-c "RewriteRule ^/Zope/(.*) $dot/../Zope.cgi/\$1 [last,e=HTTP_CGI_AUTHORIZATION:%1,t
=application/x-httpd-cgi,l]" \
and change to:
-c "RewriteRule ^/(.*) $dot/../Zope.cgi/\$1 [last,e=HTTP_CGI_AUTHORIZATION:%1,t
=application/x-httpd-cgi,l]" \
if you wish not to have to put your web server address with a
I know I posted further up the page, just to comment on reliability, I suggest using apache for the front end sine it appears to restart python servers/services if they happen to die. (ZAP for zope is what I am testing now, and have not had a zope die-off since). The default python web server seems to "shut down" without warning.
Currently ours searches a database (mysql) and has been working great, blows the NT / Oracle server out of the water (and the Zope machine is running on a computer with fewer resources and is doing much more than the NT box). So far, we have put together a server that is faster, feature rich, much easier to use, doesn't crash, and everyone is happy with and done in a couple of months where the NT / oracle equiv. took about six months, crashed continuously, needed more ram than what we had, had no remote admin/ hard to input data, and was SLOW!
Zope Rules!
Zope seems the best (actually with much more potential) solution for your Problem.
See http://www.zope.org
Letting users edit their website through web based forms isn't that hard to do. And you don't really need anything particularly special to do it. Just perl.
On my own web site (or at least the copy locally, I forget when I last uploaded it), the two sides of the table are controlled through a form. When I update one side or the other, it is saved into an index which is accessable through the backpack section below. The backpack section is also generated dynamicly by looking at the files in the backpack dir of my web site. To add something to that section, all I have to do is upload. I'm working on it. It pulls titles out of HTML files, but I need to do something different for images.
Anyway, the whole site uses perl extensively. If you know perl, it would have only taken a handfull of time to write (I wasn't that good with perl. However, the first version was written as part of a company intranet system in ASP. It only took me a few hours to do the dynamic generation from a directory and file editing tasks. The intranet version was much more complex).
-- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
Hi all
There is a system called Imaker that let users maintain their web presentation online.
You can try the system online at this URL:
http://bull.spekter.no/idemo/edit
username: demo
password: demo
Only one user at the time can use this password!
What does Geocities use for its Web Browser File uploading? Thats fairly decent (well if it had a progress indicator)
Hi, I just saw on FM the first release of a program called WebRFM (Remote File Management). Looks like it might be okay for your needs.
Apache allows the use of servlets. Combine this with an applet and you could build a pretty powerful system to do exactly this. IMHO, more powerful than a CGI solution but of course, this would require programming a front-end in Java as well as the back-end.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.