How To Set Up Your EWS Homepage

How To Set Up Your EWS Homepage

Learn about HTML and URLs

HTML is the hypertext markup language used for documents on the World Wide Web. A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, the WWW address of a document or other network resource. Here is one place to go for information:

A Beginner's Guide to HTML - NCSA

If you're new to Unix...

...and find the instructions below a little terse and cryptic, you might prefer setting up your web pages on your student or staff cluster account instead of EWS. See Setting Up Personal Web Pages. Or if you would like some practical self-help for Unix beginners, you might check out Jennifer Myer's UNIXhelp for users.

Set up your ~/public_html directory

Make sure you're in your home directory.
cd
Make your home directory world searchable (711). (Note the dot at the end of the command.)
chmod 711 .
Create a subdirectory public_html in your home directory. This directory should also be world searchable (711).
mkdir public_html chmod 711 public_html
Place the documents you want to serve in this directory. All HTML documents should have filenames ending in .html. They should be world readable (644). For example, if you have a file called myfile.html in your public_html directory, you can make it world readable by
chmod 644 ~/public_html/myfile.html
The URL for files in this directory is
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~username/filename
For example, for login name x-abcde
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~x-abcde/myfile.html
will access ~x-abcde/public_html/myfile.html.
Note: do not include public_html in the URL!. In a URL ~x-abcde means "in x-abcde's public_html" directory.
The URL http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~x-abcde/ (i.e. no filename) is the same as
http://www.ews.uiuc.edu/~x-abcde/index.html

So if you put your personal home page in ~/public_html/index.html, people can access it with the short URL. (Note: it's a good practice to use the trailing slash on directories in URLs. Some servers can get confused otherwise.) If there is no index.html, the short URL will generate a menu of all files if public_html is world readable (755) or an error message if it is only world searchable (711).
For security reasons, symbolic links under ~/public_html, except to files or directories that you own, generate an error message. Please let me know if you find a case otherwise.
For security reasons, CGI access on the EWS server is limited to faculty and faculty sponsored RA/TA's working on instructional materials.

Other Tips and Notes

You can test if things are working the way you want by using the Netscape Open button or File menu item.
You can inspect the HTML used for any document you find on the Web with the Document Source item on the Netscape View menu. Furthermore, you can save the HTML version of any document with Save As... on the File menu.
For ideas on setting up your pages try browsing the EWS Personal Pages Directory.
You can check for errors in your HTML with the Weblint Gateway on EWS.

Ed Kubaitis - ejk@uiuc.edu