ARCHIVED: At IUPUI, how do I put personal pages on the World Wide Web?

This document offers a broad overview of using Steel to publish personal World Wide Web pages at IUPUI.

You must have a Steel account in order to store files for a personal home page. If you don't have a Steel account, you can generate one online. For more information, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: At IUPUI, if I already have some computing accounts, how do I get others?

Preparing your account with spinweb

Once you have an account on Steel, you will need to select a login shell. Log into Steel using SSH and for the bash shell, enter 5. In five minutes or less the setting will take effect, and you can continue preparing your Steel account. You will need to create a www directory in your Steel account. The easiest way to do this is to use the spinweb command. At the Unix prompt on Steel, enter:

  spinweb

Answer each question as you are prompted, and when you're done, you'll have a home page. The URL of your home page will be:

  http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/

Replace username with your Network ID username.

The spinweb utility takes care of several necessary tasks. Among other things, it creates a www directory if one does not exist, and sets file permissions so that your pages can be viewed on the World Wide Web.

Note: Since Steel uses the Unix operating system, you will need to be familiar with some basic Unix commands. To get started, see the Knowledge Base documents Introduction to Unix commands and Unix online tutorials

Creating web pages

Web pages are ordinary text files that also contain some special instructions, or "tags", to tell web browsers how to process the text. For example, some tags create links or give text a special appearance. These tags constitute HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

You can create a web page with any text editor or word processing program. There are several text editors available on Steel. The easiest to use is probably Pico, though Emacs and vi are also available. You can also create web pages on your home computer or in your office using any text editor or word processor with which you are familiar. Some of these programs, such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and BBedit, come with tools that assist in creating HTML documents.

HTML editors are also available. These software programs are specifically designed to create web pages by adding HTML tags to your text automatically. For more information about HTML editors, see:

  http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Internet/World_Wide_Web/HTML_Editors/

Note: If you use a word processing program, make sure to save the file you create as a plain text file (or as HTML text, if that option is available) rather than the default word processing file format. Also, if you create your file using a word processor or HTML editor on a home, office, or Student Technology Center (STC) computer, you will need to transfer the file to Steel. If you use an HTML editor with built-in FTP capabilities, such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, you will not be able to use the editor's built-in FTP client to transfer your files to Steel. For instructions on how to transfer your files, see the section on "Transferring web pages" below.

There are several good introductions to HTML available on the web, including the following:

• NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML
• Case Western Reserve University's Introduction to HTML

You can also learn a great deal about HTML by looking at the HTML tags, or "source", of pages already on the World Wide Web. Your browser can usually show you the source of any web page you are viewing. For more information, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: How can I view the HTML code of web pages?

Transferring web pages

If you created your web page in the appropriate directory on Steel (using an editor such as Pico, Emacs, or vi), your files are already in the right place. However, if you created a web page on a workstation or at any computer other than Steel, you will need to move the file to your Steel account.

To transfer files to Steel, you will need to use a secure FTP program such as MacSFTP for the Macintosh or SSH Secure Shell for Windows.

Specific instructions for transferring files are available in the following Knowledge Base documents:

• ARCHIVED: At IU, using FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or Netscape Composer, how do I publish my web pages on Mypage or Webserve?
• ARCHIVED: Transfer files in Windows using an SSH or SFTP client
• ARCHIVED: In Mac OS X, how do I use Cyberduck to transfer files over SFTP?

Finishing up (file locations and permission)

As mentioned earlier, your web pages must be inside the www subdirectory of your home directory on Steel.

You must also make sure your files and directories have the correct permissions before they will be viewable on the World Wide Web. The easiest way to do this is by using spinweb. If you have subdirectories within your www directory, make sure that spinweb sets permissions within those directories. To do this, use the -r option. At the command prompt in your Steel account, enter:

  spinweb -r

If you prefer, you can do this by using the Unix chmod command to change directory permissions to 711 (world-executable) and file permission to 644 (world-readable). For more information, see the Knowledge Base document Manage file permissions on Unix-like systems

Accessing your web pages

Universal Resource Locator (URL)

All pages on the World Wide Web have a unique address called a URL. For your personal web pages on Steel, the URL will always begin with:

  http://mypage.iu.edu/~username

Replace username with your Network ID username. This URL will take you to the home.html file in your home directory.

For files other than home.html that are in the top level of the www directory, the URL must include the filename. For instance, if your username is dvader and you have a file in your www directory called myfile.html, the URL for the file myfile.html is:

  http:/mypage.iu.edu/~dvader/myfile.html

If the file is inside a subdirectory of the www directory, its URL includes the name of that directory, the / (forward slash) character, and the filename. For example, if dvader has a directory called death-star inside his www directory, and the death-star directory contains a file called blueprints.html, the URL for blueprints.html would be:

  http://mypage.iu.edu/~dvader/death-star/blueprints.html