What is spinweb?

Note: At Indiana University South Bend, the Mypage service is different from the Mypage service mentioned in this document. For more information, see IUSB's Web Publishing: Mypage page.

The spinweb command runs a simple utility developed at Indiana University that helps you create and maintain personal web pages on Mercury/Mypage. To use spinweb, at the Unix shell prompt on Mercury, enter:

Note: The spinweb command functions slightly differently on Mercury than it did on Steel, which formerly served Mypage web pages. In general, you will no longer need to run spinweb after creating or uploading new files. New users do not need to run spinweb before creating their web pages; the directories and template file are created automatically with the correct permissions when the account is created.

By default, spinweb does the following:

• It creates www and wwws subdirectories, if they do not already exist. These subdirectories are where you will store your web pages.
  
  
• It creates a file named home-template.html in your www directory, if it does not already exist. This is a basic HTML home page that you can use as a starting point for your web pages.
  
  
• It sets appropriate permissions for the www and wwws directories and any files they contain, so these files will be accessible to browsers. Specifically, it makes your account's web directory accessible to web browsers by adding execute permission on your home directory for all classes of users, and it makes sure that any files in the top level of your web directory have access permissions set so that they are available via the web.

  Note: It does not reduce permissions if you have previously given wider access to your files and directories than is necessary.

The spinweb command has several other options:

• To overwrite your existing home page with a new, blank template, run spinweb -t . This command will:
  
  
  • Create www and wwws subdirectories, if they do not already exist
  • Write a new home-template.html file, even if one already exists
  • Set appropriate permissions for the www and wwws directories and any files they contain, so these files will be accessible to browsers
  
  
• To change the permissions on your web pages so that no one can see them, run spinweb -d . This command will change the permissions on the www and wwws directories, and the files they contain, so your pages will not be served. Use this option if you want to make your pages inaccessible without deleting the files.
  
  
• To get help with spinweb, enter spinweb -h .

Note: If you wish, you can do everything that spinweb does using the standard Unix commands mkdir and chmod. For more information on these commands, see In Unix, how do I create a new directory? and In Unix, how do I change the permissions for a file?

Also see:

• At IU, what should I do if people get an error message when they try to view my web page?
• How do I create customized error messages for my web page?