FAQ
General
Who can sign up?
* If you’re involved in research, whatever the subject (from astrobiology to zulu studies), and irrespective of your insitutional affiliation, you’re welcome to join and start creating your pages, networking with like-minded people (or dissimilarly-minded if you prefer!). The more the merrier!
How do I add my photo to my ‘profile’ page?
* Click on the ‘edit my details’ action link on ‘my page’ or ‘home’, or on any page click on ‘account’ at the top-right of the screen on any page. There, as well as editing your address and other details you can upload a photo that will appear at the top of your profile page. The photo will be resized to the correct proportions
It’s broken, what do I do?
* Sorry, this is still a beta version and there are some bugs to iron out. Drop an email to admin@researchpages.net and we’ll get to it as soon as we can
It looks all wrong / I keep getting logged out / buttons don’t work
* Unfortunately, the nature of the web is that different browsers will render web pages differently. A site like BBC news or FaceBook will have a team of people permanently working on keeping stylesheets up to date and working with all versions of all browsers. Unfortunately, the one-man ResearchPages team just doesn’t have those resources. However the site should work fine in recent versions of Safari, and is at its best in Firefox 2.0 and above. If you really must use Internet Explorer (I strongly advise against it), then versions 6 and 7 should be OK. Anything below that and you don’t stand much of a chance (with most up-to-date sites on the net, not just ResearchPages) – you should upgrade your browser immediately. Internet explorer on the Mac is completely unsupported I’m afraid. I don’t have access to a copy of it apart from anything else. I strongly recommend you get get Firefox whatever you’re currently using, it is truly excellent and won’t give you viruses.
Whichever browser you’re using, it’s always a good idea to keep it up to date with the latest version; and to ensure most websites work correctly you should have cookies turned on (they’re not evil things, unless you’re visiting evil websites and as long as you aren’t using IE, even the evil ones won’t do you any harm) and JavaScript too. Unless you’re having problems you should assume you do have these things turned on – nearly everyone does.
Another reason for problems may be caching – for some data your browser may cache (store) bits and pieces so you don’t have to keep downloading it. This is very efficient and generally excellent but if we’ve made a change to the site (happening quite a lot in this development phase) then you might not get it unless you force a full refresh (hold down shift and control and hit the refresh / reload button).
‘Profile’ page
How do I add my photo?
* Go to ‘account’ at the top of any page, or ‘Edit my details’ on your profile page or your home page. There, as well as editing your address and other details you can upload a photo that will appear at the top of your profile page. The photo will be resized to the correct proportions
Why doesn’t my email address get displayed?
* Generally, it is not a good idea to share your email address on the internet unless you’re really keen on getting lots of spam (don’t you already get enough?). We don’t share your email address with anybody, particularly not the whole of the world!! In the future, you will have the option to show a ‘contact this person’ link on your profile page, which will allow anybody to email you through the site, but wont share your email address. In the meantime, you could always put your email address on your profile page (in the editable bit), but replace the @ symbol with ‘at’ or something similar. Just so it isn’t readable by the spambots trawling the internet.
Page editing
An image I’ve added is too big and breaks the page. How do I resize it?
*At the moment that’s an offline process – I’ve been considering a way to implement it within the web interface. The problem is that sometimes people might want to upload big images (for e.g. other people to download rather than to include in pages), so automatic resizing wouldn’t work.
Also, the imaging libraries that can be used on a web server aren’t nearly as good as those available in a good quality piece of desktop imaging software (a good free one is the GIMP – http://www.gimp.org/windows/ for windows or http://www.gimp.org/ if you’re running linux). Then you can get your images just right before you upload them.
Alternatively, you can specify pixel dimensions within an html image tag e.g. <img src=“blah” width=“400” />. However, this is risky – some browsers are pretty terrible at resizing the images themselves and it’s rather inefficient as the browser still downloads the data for the full size image and then shrinks it on the fly. If it looks OK in internet explorer done like this, it’ll probably be OK with any browser. It really depends on the image and the ratio of full size pixel dimensions to shrunk pixel dimensions (there are no rules there, it’s ostensibly a random process, depending on the image in question).
400 pixels is a good width for the standard researchpages pages. Standard sidebars are 289 pixels wide, so that would be the max width for a sidebar image. In the future there will be a choice of page layouts for each CMS page. Then things will get a little more complicated….