Making Your Own WWW Page
The Ohio State University
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
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Creating Your Personal WWW Page

Creating Files and Directories

To set up the files and directories you need, execute the following commands from any shell (terminal) window on any of the ER4 Unix Systems:

cd
mkdir public_html
touch public_html/index.html
chmod o+x ~/
chmod o+x public_html
chmod o+r public_html/index.html

Those commands do the following things:

  1. Changes the curent directory to your root directory.
  2. Creates a public_html directory to store your WWW files. All the files that are part of your WWW page must reside in this directory or a subdirectory of it.
  3. Creates a blank file called index.html. This is the first file that will be loaded by people visiting your WWW pages.
  4. The three chmod commands set proper permissions, allowing the WWW server to access the files in your public_html directory.

Your Address on the Web

The URL for your page is as follows

http://www.ece.osu.edu/~username

Substitute your username (the name you use to log into your account), for username in the above examples. So, if your username is userj, the URL for your personal WWW page would be:

http://www.ece.osu.edu/~userj

Writing your Personal Page

The most important part is actually writing your page. The WWW uses a simple language called HTML to format documents. Formatting to done with "tags" that activate and deactive various kinds of formatting. For example, if I wanted to make a work show up in boldface, I'd use the <b> tag:

The word <b>bold</b> is bold
The word bold is bold

Here is an example of what a finished personal home page might look like when viewed with a WWW browser like Netscape, and here is the HTML code for that page as it might appear in emacs. You can use these as examples for your own home page, but be certain to change all the HTML to reflect you - not the "example" user.

Use a text editor such as emacs to edit ~/public_html/index.html to your liking. Following are some reference materials to help familiarize you with the HTML language:

  • A Beginner's Guide to HTML: Read this to get up and started - it's an excellent introduction to basic HTML authoring. It doesn't include all the fancy, flashy stuff that you're probably aching to do - but you have to walk before you run.
  • HTML 4.01: As of this writing, HTML 4.01 is the "standard" for HTML; major features include frames, tables, client-side imagemaps, font attributes, and more - many "pioneered" by Netscape and Internet Explorer. This is the closest thing to an official definition of HTML that you'll find, but don't count on all browsers supporting all the nifty features.
  • Netscape's Resources for Creating Web Sites page: This points to Netscape's own resources (some of which are pointed to here) and documents all the Netscape-specific extensions to HTML. Note that using these tags in your document may very well make your page unreadable by WWW browsers such as Mosaic or Lynx and depending on the day, IE as well.
  • The Bare Bones Guide to HTML: This isn't going to teach you how to write HTML, but it's an excellent reference to virtually every HTML tag that can be used. Use this once you're comfortable writing HTML, and just want an "index" of the various tags at your disposal.

A few notes from the EECF/RCC4 Admins about writing your pages:

  • Quota: Your WWW pages, being stored in your user account, do count against your disk quota. Keep that in mind, expecially in RCC4.
  • Random Hints: <blink> is bad. The text content of your page should take up more space than the pretty pictures. Remember that a lot of people access pages via modem, so keep the big graphics to a minimum. All WWW pages are "under construction" - it's the nature of the WWW - so don't bother with such notices.
  • Consultation: Site does not actively support users who are attempting to create WWW pages. While you may email your questions to webmaster, such questions will take a rather low priority. We suggest that you consult the references above, newsgroups in the comp.infosystems.www.* hierarchy, and even view the source of other pages to answer your "how do I do that?" questions. It's how we learned. :-)
  • Content: The department of Electrical & Computer Engineering has an Honor Code (posted in the elevator lobby, 2nd floor, Dreese Lab), and The Ohio State University has various (and often confusing) policies regarding student, faculty, and staff conduct. We expect that all users will attempt to adhere to these policies as regards the content of their WWW pages, and note that Site Administration will cooperate with the Department or the University if those policies are flaunted. Additionally, Site Adminstration reserves the right to shut down any WWW pages that produce an undue load on the network or servers - regardless of content.

Listing your Page

There is a list of user accounts for the department, including links to WWW pages if the user has one. These lists are created weekly by a system job which searches each user account for a public_html directory. At this writing, the job runs every Sunday morning at 1:30am.

If you have created a personal WWW page, there is nothing that you have to do in order to be listed. The next time the job runs, it will find your pages and automatically update your entry in the list

Some links in the listing return a 403 Forbidden error. This is because the user has not set proper file permissions (see the chmod commands at the top of this document). The list-builder does not check for file permissions, because doing so would add several hours to the overall processing time. If you come across such a page, send the user email telling them to refer to this page.

 

 
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