Creating Your Own Home Page

Information Technology Services (ITS) provides server space on the mail.rochester.edu system for students, faculty, and staff to publish their own home pages. The steps needed to get your home page up and running are outlined below.

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Create Your Web Pages:

Your web pages are written in HTML which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. ITS does not provide consulting support for creating personal HTML pages. However, there are a vast assortment of How-To guides available on the Internet. An excellent introduction to HTML is found in NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML.

Any text editor such as Notepad for Windows, SimpleText for the Macintosh, or joe for Unix can be used to create your web pages. In addition, you can also use an HTML editor such as Netscape Composer or Macromedia Dreamweaver (available for both Macintosh and Windows).

IMPORTANT!! Please Note:

1. The main page of your personal web site must be named index.html
2. User account quotas are 100 Megabytes on mail.rochester.edu to allow for space to store web pages. This quota is for ALL files that are in your account (mail, web pages, news articles, etc.). If you want more space for your web pages, you will need to delete some of your other mail, news, and other files.

3. CGI Scripts will not be available for use.

4. If you do wish to use CGI Scripts on your web pages or would like more space to store web pages, we suggest that you apply for an account on roundtable. Roundtable is a system that is supported by the Computer Interest Floor (CIF). You can apply for a roundtable account by filling out an application online. You can also write to CIF for more information.

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Create Web Page Directory:

Once you have created your web pages, you have to publish them to the correct directory on the web server. Create a directory called public_html in your home directory on mail.rochester.edu. This is accomplished by issuing the following command after successfully logging into mail.rochester.edu :

mkdir ~/public_html

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Transfer Web Pages to mail.rochester.edu :

Next you must transfer your completed HTML documents to the newly created directory. This is done using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Two common ftp programs supported on campus are Fetch for the Macintosh and WS_FTP for Windows.

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Change Permissions on HTML Files:

Finally, you must enable the world to read your files in order to view them on the World Wide Web. This is done by changing the file permissions for your web pages. From the mail prompt type:

	chmod 711 ~
	chmod 755 ~/public_html
	chmod -R 744 ~/public_html/*

These commands will turn on read access to all of your files under the public_html directory.

If you add any web pages in the future, you will need to change permissions on those web pages as well by issuing these same commands.

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View Web Site in Browser:

The final step is to check to make sure that your pages have been published correctly. In your browser enter the URL for your web site. The URL will always be of the form:

http://mail.rochester.edu/~username

Replace username with your mail.rochester.edu 


For more help:
You can send an e-mail to UnivITHelp@rochester.edu


You can also stop by Taylor Hall and work with the Rm. 31 Consultants
or a member of the UR Web group.  You can call x5-2811 for more information.


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Last updated Monday, 17-Aug-2009 12:28:45 EDT

by University ITS Web Services