How To Create Your Own Homepage on the World Wide Web

For bobcat, hilltop, and cegt201 users only

A simplistic ten-step guide:

1. Learn to use vi or other UNIX editor. A good way to learn vi is to spend about twenty minutes with the vi tutor. You can run this from your system prompt quite easily:

	$ vitutor

2. Learn how to write in HTML (hypertext markup language). This is the "code" you will use to write your hypertext documents for the World Wide Web. My best advice for you is to study the NCSA'S HTML Primer, a document specifically written for beginners.

Also, you can use your browser to view the HTML source of any WWW document you find. In lynx this is accomplished with the backslash ("\") key; in Netscape choose "View," then "Document Source." This is a great way to "learn by example" what a typical HTML document looks like.

3. Make a directory called "public_html" under your home directory. This is where you will place all of your public files for viewing on the WWW.

	$ cd
	$ mkdir public_html

4. Make your home directory and the new directory world-executable (bobcat users can skip this step).

	$ chmod o+x .
	$ chmod o+x public_html

5. Make as many HTML files within this directory as you want. Make sure the filenames all end in ".html", or some web-reading programs might not recognize them as being HTML.

Alternately, if a particular file won't be using any extended features of HTML (inline images, hypertext links, headers, etc.), you can make it a regular, plain-text file just as easily. This won't show up as pretty in graphical readers such as Netscape, but it could save you a little effort. If you do it this way, do not end the filename with ".html".

6. Each time you're ready to make one of these files available on the WWW, you need to make the file world-readable.

	$ chmod o+r filename

If you have several such files in the same directory, you can hit them all at once just as easily:

	$ chmod o+r *

7. You should now be able to access your files through your favorite browser (such as lynx or Netscape). The "URL" of each file, which can be thought of as the file's unique address on the World Wide Web, will be

	http://machinename/~loginname/filename

For example, consider a user named "foo" who is using bobcat and has made a world-readable file called "bar.html" in his "public_html" directory. The URL of this file is

	http://bobcat.bradley.edu/~foo/bar.html

As with any document on the Web, you can access it from the system prompt by typing "lynx" followed by the URL:

	$ lynx http://bobcat.bradley.edu/~foo/bar.html

NOTE: This is one case when you can safely omit the ".bradley.edu", and lynx will infer it since you are already within the bradley domain. However, be sure to always include complete URLs in your documents or web-readers around the world will have trouble reading your documents.

8. If you are accumulating a lot of files in the public_html directory, you might choose to organize them into directories. Remember, unless you are using bobcat, you will need to make the directories world-executable:

	$ mkdir newdirectory
	$ chmod +x newdirectory

9. A shortcut: if the name of an HTML file you are accessing over the web happens to be "index.html", you can omit the filename from the URL and it will be inferred. For example, if the user "foo" from our previous example also had a file called index.html, that file's URL would simply be

	http://bobcat.bradley.edu/~foo/

(Note: the trailing slash IS important!)

Because of this shortcut, it's a good idea to use "index.html" as the filename of the "main" document in each directory you create; the first screen which contains links pointing to the various other documents you have in that directory.

10. When you feel that your new home page is ready, register it in the ph database. This way, a link pointing to it will be added to the student or faculty/staff list of homepages within 24 hours, and everyone looking there will see that you have joined the community. For help with this, take a look at Fred Jaggi's example.

And that's really about all there is to it! I would welcome any comments you have on this document. Good luck with your homepage!