ARCHIVED: The basics of creating a personal home page at IUPUI

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Note: UITS has replaced Cord accounts for IUPUI students, faculty, and staff with accounts on Steel, an interactive environment for general purpose Unix computing, which is also the location for editing personal Web pages at IU. On December 23, 2002, UITS retired Cord. For information on how to create a Steel account, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: What was Steel?

Note: This document contains only the essentials of creating a home page at IUPUI. Also, note that even though the steps are divided into categories, they are in chronological order.

Preliminary steps

Create an account on Steel. If you need information on how to create a new account, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: At IUPUI, if I already have some computing accounts, how do I get others?
Use SSH to log into your Steel account. If this is the first time you've accessed your account, you will need to select a login shell. In five minutes or less, the setting will take effect, and you can log back in to continue preparing your Steel account.
At the Unix prompt, enter:
```
  spinweb 
```
The spinweb command does several things:
1. It creates a www directory, if one does not exist.
2. It creates a home.html file in the www directory, if you do not have one in your account.
3. It sets the permissions on all the files in the www directory to make them world-readable.
If you add additional files to your www directory, run spinweb again to set the correct file permissions.
To change to your www directory, enter:
```
  cd www
```

Creating a home page

If you are not familiar with HTML, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: How can I learn about HTML? If you have previous experience with web design, but would like additional information, visit the Indiana University Bloomington Webmaster page at:
```
  http://webmaster.indiana.edu/
```
To create your home page, choose one of the following ways:
- Use a Unix editor such as Pico or Emacs to create and edit the home.html file. If you are familiar with HTML and Unix editors, this is probably the easiest and most convenient way to create your home page. For example, if Luke Skywalker ran spinweb, his home.html file would look like this:
```
  <HTML><HEAD> 
   
  <TITLE>Sample Personal Home Page for Luke Skywalker </TITLE> 
  </HEAD> 
  <BODY>
  <H1>Sample Personal Home Page for Luke Skywalker</H1>
   <P> does not yet have a personal web page.

  
 
  </BODY></HTML>
```
  If Luke chose to edit his home.html file, he might change it to look like this:
```
  <HTML>

  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Luke Skywalker</TITLE>
  </HEAD>

  <BODY>

  <H1>Welcome to my home page!</H1>

  <P>
    I'm working on this page in my spare time (when I'm not out saving
    the galaxy).  Stay tuned for more!
  </P>

  
  
  </BODY>

  </HTML>
```
  If you choose to create your pages using this method, be sure to save your home page with the filename home.html.
- Use a word processor, making sure to save your files with the extension .html (or if you are using a Windows word processor, save your files with the extension .htm).
- Use software designed for creating web pages, such as Netscape Composer or Microsoft FrontPage.
If you do not create your home page using a Unix editor on Steel, you will need to use a secure FTP program to transfer your pages to the www directory in your Steel account. For details on using secure FTP, see the Knowledge Base document Use SFTP to transfer files 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 more information, see the Knowledge Base document ARCHIVED: At IU, using FrontPage, Dreamweaver, or Netscape Composer, how do I publish my web pages on Mypage or Webserve?

Making your web pages viewable

Any new files or directories that you add to the www directory must have permissions set to world-viewable in order to be accessed on the World Wide Web.

After you save or transfer your files to your account, log into your Steel account. At the Unix prompt, enter:

  spinweb

This will set the necessary permissions on your Steel account directories and files so that they are world-viewable. If you have subdirectories within your www directory, make sure that spinweb sets permissions within those directories. To do this, run spinweb in recursive mode by entering:

  spinweb -r

Note: You can do everything that spinweb does using the standard Unix commands mkdir and chmod. For more information on these commands, see the Knowledge Base document Manage file permissions on Unix-like systems

Note: The URL http://mypage.iu.edu/~username replaces the php.indiana.edu and php.iupui.edu URLs for personal web pages at Indiana University. If you already have a web page at the php.indiana.edu address, you do not need to move your pages; they will automatically appear at the new URL. You do need to update any of your existing pages that point to the old Php address. For more information, see the Knowledge Base document About pages.iu.edu

ARCHIVED: The basics of creating a personal home page at IUPUI

Preliminary steps

Creating a home page

Making your web pages viewable

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