Intro to Creating Personal Web Pages
Anyone with an account on email.uah.edu may now create personal web pages on
the webpages.uah.edu server (which is actually email under a different name).
This document is a work-in-progress that will help you in getting your pages
published. As more people have questions, more will be added to this
document.
Where to upload the files
Each person's home directory has a link called "public_html" which points
to their web directory. The name "public_html" is sort of a standard that
implements the ~username way of locating web pages belonging to a particular
user. All pictures and images should be uploaded to this directory. You
may create subdirectories under this one if you wish. Each person has a
quota of 100 megabytes on the web disk (in addition to the quotas for your
home directory and mail spool).
How to access your pages
The general way to access your pages is by using a URL like this:
http://webpages.uah.edu/~username/filename
where username is your email.uah.edu login name and filename is the name
of a document you have uploaded. If you leave off the file name, the server
will search your public_html directory for a file called "index.html" and then
for a file called "index.htm" to display. If you do not have a file by one of
these two names, you will need to include the file name in any URL you
give out.
Getting your page in the index (or keeping it out)
We have a cron job that runs each night that searches through all web
directories looking for an index.html or index.htm file.
If it finds one, it opens that file looking
for a <title> tag. It will then use the title as hyperlink text to your
page. If you do not wish for your pages to be indexed in this manner,
simply create a file in your public_html directory called "noindex" and
your index file will not be looked at.
Learning how to publish web pages
Currently, Information Services does not offer students any classes on
web publishing. Students can, however, take MIS 114, "Web Publishing Using
HTML" for academic credit. In addition, the University Center occasionally
sponsors workshops on web publishing. Check the calendar outside the UC
for dates and availability.
The College of Administrative Science website has an excellent tutorial
on using the WS_FTPLE client to upload personal web pages. It is located at
http://www.uah.edu/colleges/adminsci/tutorials/ftp.htm.
What does and does not work
You should not have any problems serving pages consisting of static HTML
code (including JavaScript and Java applets, since these are executed by the
user's browser, not by the server). However, please note that there are
no provisions to support cgi-bin programs, nor do we offer support for the
Microsoft FrontPage Server Extensions. Our web server runs the Apache HTTPD
Server, available from The Apache Software
Foundation.
Questions?
If you have questions, please send email to
mccullj@uah.edu and we will try to get
and answer back to you as soon as possible.