My remote subsite doesn't work! Why?

Gigascale Systems Research Center
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Editing group pages, and other forms of rocket science

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My remote subsite doesn't work! Why?
John Reekie, 29 Jun 1999

Remote subsites are a little tricky, because we are making the contents of your site appear to be on the GSRC website. Because of this, there are some restrictions on what you can do in a remote subsite. In two categories:

How to structure your page

The remote URL that you give in your group configuration page must be a directory on your server, not a single HTML file. For example,
```
  http://myserver/mypath/myfile.html
```
will not work. It needs to be
```
  http://myserver/mypath/
```

Links within your subsite must be relative. For example, the index.html file that is served by the above path should have link such as these:

  <a href="anotherfile.html">A subsection<:/a>
  <a href="subdir/">Another subsection</a>
  <a href="subdir/somefile.html">Link into a subsection</a>
  <img src="images/foo.gif"> An embedded image

Generally, it is preferable to place all the contents of your subsite underneath the root of your HTML tree. This makes maintenance etc easier. However, if you do have images or binary files that are above the location of your HTML tree, then you can reference them by using the full server path:
```
  <img src="http://ping.pong.edu/images/foo.gif">
```
(Note: do not do this with HTML files!)
If you are having trouble with URLs, try turning on the "Fix HTML" option in your group configuration pages. This will make the server perform some extra parsing of your pages to try and reduce problems caused by not-quite-right HTML.

Things you can't do for technical reasons

Frames. Because the GSRC server takes the contents of your page and "wraps" them up with its own headers and footer, it really really wants to see a simple HTML page. For this reason, pages with frames will not come through properly.
Badly-formed HTML. Because we are processing your HTML and embedding it within the GSRC pages, the server requires correctly-formed HTML. In particular, things that can prevent your page from displaying are:
- No <body> tag.
- Too many <body> and </body> tags.
- Malformed tables. Each <table>, <tr>, and <td> tag must have a matching end tag.
If you have pages that don't show up or are strange, check that they have the following structure:
```
<html>
<head>
<title>My Title</title>
</head>
<body>
...
</body>
</html>
```
This will make life much easier for the parser... You can also try turning on the "Fix HTML" option in your group configuration pages. This makes the parser do some extra work to try and make sense of odd HTML, but there is no guarantee that it will fix anything.