"Psychweb" is the title of the group of individuals authorized to create and share files within the cunix psychology directory, where most of the web pages used for teaching and advising reside. A brief history of psychweb is available below. Much of the site is also maintained by a content management system and thus is off limits to psychweb members.

Thanks to the contributions of past and present psychweb members, the psychology directory and its subdirectories receive thousands of hits a day, and have become a crucial part of our teaching, advising, and research infrastructure.

Below are some very important guidelines to keep in mind when publishing in the psychology directory. Note that this is not a web-publishing primer; you should already be experienced at web publishing before you begin to upload pages to the psychology directory. If you would like to be added to the psychweb group, please first develop your skills within your own public_html directory.

General guidelines for psychweb members

1. The Psychology Directory on cunix. The url for the psychology directory is http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/ . If you are a Mac user, then we recommend that you use fugu to upload pages, with "cunix.cc.columbia.edu" as host. You can also access the directory through Cunix. Click here if you need help accessing the directory with Fugu or through Cunix. For Windows we recomend WinSCP or FileZilla.
   
   
2. Practice makes perfect. Before you begin publishing in the psychology directory, you should try out your wings by uploading and revising pages within your own cunix or other directory. You especially should practice using all the unix commands you're likely to use in the psychology directory when accessing the directory through Cunix. To quote Pam Statz, "Unix is very powerful. The wrong collection of keystrokes can blow away files that you'll probably never be able to recover, so practice on sample files before you move on to anything important".
   
   
3. Don't Trespass! If a page states that it is maintained by a particular person, you should not modify that page unless you have his/her permission to do so. This is particularly important for "official" dept web pages, such as those related to the curriculum. Any web page in the psychology/dept/ directory is an official department web page.
   Exceptions to the "Don't Trespass" rule: If it's a genuine emergency and the person who regularly maintains the page is not available, then you may:
   (a) carefully back up the original page within its directory
   (b) upload your revisions
   (c) email the owner of the page and the psychweb owner describing exactly what you did.
   
   
4. Take care when uploading index.html. First of all, make sure to give your files a unique name before uploading a new page and double check the directory contents to make sure that you do not accidentally write over someone else's page of the same name. Secondly, since "index.html" is a file name used in many of the subdirectories, be extremely cautious, when uploading a new "index.html" file, to make sure that you are uploading in the correct subdirectory.
   
   
5. To leave a backup copy online . When revising a page that others have worked on, such as a course syllabus, leave a copy of the previous version in the directory. One way to do this is to rename the current file just before you upload the new one. Common ways to rename are, for example, to add a tilde (~) to the filename, as in index~.html or to incorporate the last modification date in the filename, as in w2630_9_18_01.html (where w2630.html was last modified on 9/18/01).
   
   
6. Modification Date. When revising a page where the modification date is displayed on the web page, please change the modification date to the current date if your web-publishing application doesn't do this automatically.
   
   
7. File Permissions. It is neccesary to set file permissions to protect and to instruct the server about how to handle certain files.
   
   The easiest way to set permissions is through an inbuilt tool in an ftp client such as Fugu.
   
   
   They can also be set using raw FTP commands through Cunix for example.When connecting with the host cunix.cc.columbia.edu through Cunix, you will need to set permissions to 775 or 774. The following table shows the pattern of permissions corresponding to $ chmod 775.
   
   

   
   

   	Read	Write	Search/Execute
   Owner	Yes	Yes	Yes
   Group	Yes	Yes	Yes
   Everyone/ Public	Yes	No	Yes*

   
   
   Yes* becomes a No in the Everyone or Public row under the Write column if 775 is used. Click here for tips on setting file permissions.
   
   Group designation should be psychweb. When accesing psychweb through Cunix, check to see that your newly uploaded files and folders have the group designation "psychweb". Click here for tips on how to fix it if they don't.
   
   
8. Check your work. After uploading or revising a page, be sure to view it on the web and to test any links you changed.
   
   
9. Accidents will happen. If you accidentally write over an existing page that belonged to someone else, you may need to take emergency action. A page may be critically important to, for instance, students studying for a midterm the next day. "Emergency action" includes:
   (a) trying to locate the most recent backup copy and restoring it;
   (b) notifying all relevant parties (Phredd, Peter, Kevin, Lois, Pam, Prof/TAof the course, etc.)
   
   
10. Offline backup copies. Please be sure to keep backup copies of any files you create or maintain.
    
    
11. The Ultimate Authority. The Curriculum Committee of the Dept. of Psychology (consisting of the dept. chair, the directors of the undergraduate and graduate programs, the COSI representative, and the Postbac and Neuroscience and Behavior program advisors) is the ultimate authority on what may be posted on the departmental web pages. Currently, Lois Putnam is the chair of the Curriculum Committee.

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Brief History

The psychweb group was created in October 1995 by David Atwood, the department's network administrator. David remained the department's webmaster until his departure in February 2000, when ownership of psychweb was temporarily turned over to Lois Putnam until a new webmaster could be hired.

From February 2000 until January 2002 , Lois was acting webmaster and owner of psychweb. In March 2001, the 21 members of psychweb included 13 graduate students, 4 faculty, and 4 dept staff: Corby Dale, Jasia Pietrzak, Jeni Mangels, Joe Cesario, John Tang, Julian Hochberg, Kate Lynch, Lara Kammrath, Lilly Ahmad, Lisa Son, Lois Putnam, Mike Drew , Nate Kornell, Pam Freeman, Rahul Dodhia, Robert Krauss, Robert Omeljanivk, Rudy Mendoza-Denton , SiNae Pitts, Taosheng Liu, and Tomislav Pavlicic. As of August 2008 psychweb has almost 40 members, including about 15 current and former grad students, 8 faculty, and a fair number of department staff and lab personnel.

In January 2002, Phredd Groves took over as webmaster and psychweb owner. In September 2008 we will bid a sad farewell to Phredd and welcome Peter Tripp as webmaster and psychweb owner.

We thank lab manager Kevin Flora for the instructions below. Kevin is on leave from lab manager duties in Fall 2008 while he studies in China.

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Instructions for how to gain access to and use Psychweb

Accessing the psychology directory.

A. Using Fugu:

1. Launch Fugu

2. Supply Host name and Directory in the Connect to bar as shown below.

3. Supply your own User ID ("uni") in the Username bar and cunix password when prompted.

From here click on psychweb icon seen below. You will then have access to the psychweb directory.

B. Directly through cunix:

login to your cunix account; at the $ prompt, type:

$ cd /www/data/cu/psychology/

Here's a shortcut recommended to us by Rahul:

To access the psychology directory easily, type in the following command in your cunix home directory:
ln -s /www/data/cu/psychology/ psychweb
This creates a symbolic directory called psychweb in your home directory. From then on, if you type
cd psychweb
you will be taken straight to the psychology directory.

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File Permissions

When uploading files or creating subdirectories within the psychology directory, please make especially sure among all permissions you set to set group permissions to read and write enabled. Otherwise no one but Phredd will be able to edit your files whenever ACIS makes its emergency ownership changes..

1. Setting Permissions using Fugu:

You will need to specify file permissions when using Fugu. To see all the attributes and permissions of an item after connecting to cunix.cc.columbia.edu with Fugu, whether on your computer or on the SFTP server, select the item and click on Info from the Fugu task bar on top, or right click after selecting the item and select Get Info. In the info panel, you can modify file permissions, set owner and group, and see other information pertaining to the selected item.

Check all three boxes in the Owner line and Groupe line (i.e. Read, write and Execute). On the Others/Public line, select Read and Execute only. NOTE: Be careful not to click OK while the boxes are empty; you could lose permission to read your own file! See below for how a correct permissions check list should look.

In the Fugu window corresponding with the remote, or online, portion of your account, file permissions will appear in a column heading above your files. If you do not see permissions, go to view, then Columns, then select permissions. Your file permissions and group designation should look like the 200bc folder below.

More specifically, the correct file permissions set for the folder 200bc imply: Owner: -rwx (i.e. read+write+execute), Group: rwx (i.e read+write+execute), Others/Public: r-x (i.e. read and execute).

All toghether directory file permissions should read as rwxrwsr-x. (as shown in the Fugu window above)

2. Setting permissions with Cunix

The Center for New Media Teaching and Learning recommends the use of cunix.cc.columbia.edu when posting course web pages.

Below are the UNIX commands to set group permissions correctly for directories, and for files within a directory.

$ chmod 774 *.* or $ chmod 775 *.*

CHMOD stands for Change Mode and simply means that you are changing your permissions on the file or folder. "CHMOD" is also a UNIX command that is used in code and through the command line to change permissions on files and folders. The numbers 7 7 5 designate the permissions allowed to the Owner 7, the Group 7 and Others/Public 5. In FTP number notation, "Read" is represented by the number 4, "Write" is represented by the number 2 and "Execute" is represented by the number 1. The actual permission for each group is based on the number sum for each column, 4+2+1 = 7 .

A combination of the three permissions will create a different total for that column, which again represents the permissions designation for that file. So for each column, which represents each user, e.g. owner, group etc, you simply enter the permissions sum that you want for that user based on the number notation explained above. The permissions notations -rwxrwxr-x" or CHMOD 775 alloted to a file allow it to run properly and which are just two ways to represent the same thing.

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Group designation

When using Cunix, you will need to set the file group designation. The Group name on all files and directories should be psychweb. Below you can see that the subdirectory /goals has the correct designation, but the file EthicalTrng.html is incorrectly designated "studmail."

$ cd/www/data/cu/psychology/courses/6200
$ ls -l
total 16
-rwxrwxr-x 1 lep1 studmail 11889 Mar 30 2000 EthicalTrng.html
drwxrwxr-x 5 lep1 psychweb 4096 Jan 23 2000 goals

To change the group designation for a single file, issue the command:

$ chgrp psychweb filename

which in our example would be

$ chgrp psychweb EthicalTrng.html

To change it for all files within a directory, you can use the wildcard character.

$ chgrp psychweb *

Once you have done this, you can verify that it worked using

$ ls -l

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