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Creating Your Personal Home Page

No Name Newlsetter Article -- September 1994

Cathy Curry

Please note: this service will be available on ECN Solaris file servers on September 12, 1994.

Before attempting to create your own home page, you should probably familiarize yourself with the World Wide Web (WWW), MOSAIC, Uniform Resource Locators (URL) and HyperText Markup Language (HTML). You need only a basic knowledge of these topics to create a simple home page.

If your department has a faculty/staff/student directory, you can contact your site specialist and he/she can link your personal home page to the departmental listing. You may want to check the information your department is providing about you and customize your home page accordingly.

To create a personal home page

Your home directory must have world and group search permission. To achieve this task, type chmod og+x ~your-login .
Create a new directory in your home directory called public-web, mkdir public-web . Your public-web must be world and group readable and searchable chmod og+rx public-web .
If you have multiple home directories, choose the machine to which all of your mail is forwarded. If you do not know to what machine your mail is forwarded, use the finger command. Type finger your-login .
Type cd public-web to change directories into public-web

Using your favorite text editor, create a file called Index.html. In your Index.html file, type in the following:
<html> <head> <title>this is my home page</title> </head> <body> <h1>My Home Page</h1> <p> This is where you put in text, pictures, any information you wish to present, using HTML. This information will make up your personal home page. <p> </body> </html>

Save this file and exit your editor. Your Index.html file must be world and group readable chmod og+r Index.html .
Verify everything works by selecting the File/Open URL menu in MOSAIC and entering your home page URL. Your home page URL will be:
http://.ecn.purdue.edu/~your-login/
This is the URL that people both on and off campus will use to reference your personal home page.
This is also the convention to use when you want to open another person's home page. For example, if you want to open Cathy Curry's home page, enter the URL:
http://harbor.ecn.purdue.edu/~cathyc/

To determine the URL for another person's home page use the finger command again with their login name.

Technical Details

There are several things you should want to be aware of when modifying your home page.

The URL to your home page is:
http://<home directory machine>.ecn.purdue.edu/~your login/

The public-web directory in your home directory can be a symbolic link to another directory if you choose.

Symbolic links can also be used within your public-web directory. This is a good way to make other files in your account or elsewhere on the system available via WWW. Users can view files and directories through symbolic links as long as the symbolic link and the file/directory have the same owner.

Try to use relative paths rather than absolute paths as much as possible in hyperlinks and inline images. For example, if you would like to refer to the GIF file ~/public-web/me.gif, the relative hyperlink in your ~/public-web/Index.html should look something like:
<a href = "me.gif">My picture.

When the WWW server finds an Index.html file in a public-web directory,your personal home page will be displayed. If an Index.html file is not found in public-web, the contents of public-web will be displayed. If a public-web directory is not found, the user will see the error message:
404 Not Found The requested URL ~login was not found on this server

If the machine name is incorrect in the URL you are attempting to access, you will receive the error message:
404 Not Found The requested URL /.ecn.purdue.edu/~login was not found on this server

Any file that is world readable and can be accessed from your public-web directory can be read by the world. This means that if there exists a symbolic link from somewhere in your public-web directory to a directory outside of your public-web directory, anyone could read all world readable files contained in the referenced directory. Be very careful when making symbolic links to files outside your public-web directory.

Graphics can be included at any point with the <img src = "..."> tag. The directory where image files are stored is /home/ups3/www/images. This directory contains ECN standard GIF files that you can copy into your own directory. NOTE: You should copy these files. Do not make links to them as their names and/or location may change without notice.

webmaster@ecn.purdue.edu
Last modified: Friday, 02-Jan-98 20:25:58 EST
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