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How to write your own WWW home page

How to write your own WWW home page

The easy way

A script is available on the math computers to automate setting up your web site. Simply log into math or any other computer, open a terminal window and type create_web. The script will create a directory to store your pages in, install a sample file, and make the necessary changes to permissions needed for your page to be viewed. You will be given futher instructions when you run the script.

To run this script, open a terminal on a departmental linux, solaris, or Mac OS X machine and 'create_web' and press the return key.

The old way

It's easy to create your own World Wide Web home page that others can access. All you need to do is create a world-accessible directory called WWW and add your name to the list of people who have homepages. E.g.:

math %  cd			       # make sure you're in your home dir
math %  mkdir WWW		       # make a subdirectory called WWW
math %  chmod a+rx WWW		       # make sure everyone can read it
math %  chmod a+x .                    # give permission for people to have
                                       # access to your home directory

Then put world-readable hypertext files in that directory. For a user bob the file index.html would have the address of:

 http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~bob/index.html

For information on URLs (Uniform Resource Locator or document addresses), HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and how to write hypertext documents see the section Webmaster's Links on our local information page.

If the URL is of the form:

 http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~bob

(i.e., no file specified) then the file index.html is used (if it exists).

Getting started with HTML

To create or edit your web page, you have two primary options. The first is to use a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) HTML editor. These editors are very similar to word processors such as Microsoft Word, and allow you to edit your webpage with no knowledge of HTML by marking up text as you would in Word. For this route, we recommend using Netscape/Mozilla Composer (found under the Window menu in Netscape or Mozilla).

The second and more commonly used method is to write HTML directly using a text editor (such as vi, emacs, or any other plain text editor). HTML is relatively simple and there are numerous tutorials out there to help. In addition, the computer support group has a number of HTML books available for checkout in MW 430. Here are some helpful links to get started.


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Last updated by Webmaster on 10/19/06