Introduction:Introduction:NoteServ is simple extension with a lot of power behind it. Any note you write and file in a specially selected folder will be made available on the WWW when nHTTPd is active. These Notes can be
and NoteServ will dish them up just the same, turning them from Notes to Web pages behind the scenes. You don't have to do a thing!
You're not limited to boring old notes, either. You can also serve up fancy hybrid HTML/text notes, straight HTML notes, or run CGI scripts from within your Notes. Information on how to do these tasks is in the "Advanced" Chapter.
However, let me STRESS once again that you don't need to mess with the advanced stuff at all to make NoteServ and NPDS work for YOU. It's designed to be simple for the casual user but powerful for the super-user.
We've established that making Notes available to WWW visitors is as simple as writing down some text in a Note and filing that Note in the folder you have selected to be your WWW directory. There's no length limit on these notes other than the length imposed by the Newton Operating System.
Let's discuss some special features of NoteServ you can use to GREATLY enhance the content of your served Notes that don't require any work on your part.
NoteServ contains two services for submitting notes remotely via a WWW browser. Users can post to the directory designated as the WWW service directory. These are special notes and will be designated via an internal mechanism as being client posted. You, the administrator, can post notes using a separate service. You can post to any folder on your Newton (allowing you to send data to your Newt that's NOT available on the Web). You'll need to know your admin password and be able to limit your Notes to around 2048 bytes but other than that you're set. So how do these work?
If you point the browser to http://your.newton.com/html/postnote.html you'll get the Whiteboard for Public Users screen which contains a form for submitting Name, Title, and Note Text. One can easily embed this URL with the text "Whiteboard" by inserting the Server Side Include <NOTE_POST> where you want a link to the Public Whiteboard.
There is no SSI for this path (though you could write one..). To get to it, point to /html/admin-post.html Once there, enter the title and text of the note, choose a folder, and enter your admin password. Your note will be posted into that folder.
Within note, any properly formatted URL will automatically be turned into a clickable link. For example, if you write http://www.apple.com/ in a Note, it will be displayed on the client's web browser as http://www.apple.com/ The same is true for gopher, ftp, mailto:, and even hotline addresses. This is great for making lists of hyperlinks, etc for later viewing or sharing.
You can apply preferences to the way NPDS formats your Notes. In the Appearance Panel of NPDS Setup program, you'll find several variables that you can set. You can specify
In addition, to facilitate display of non-American ASCII characters you may wish to specify a MIME character set.
Quickly, NoteServ supports a range of special variables called Server Side Includes. Basically, they're stand-ins for common things like your Name, City, etc as well as for specialized functions like a Search Form for your Notepad that are replaced an instant before a page containing them is sent to a WWW Client. We'll talk about these in later sections of the Manual but I thought I'd introduce them to you early on since they are a core NPDS concept.