ARCHIVED: At IU, how can I publish personal pages on Mypage?
On this page:
- Introduction
- Getting a Steel account
- Preparing your Steel account
- Creating web pages
- Transferring web pages
- Finishing up (file locations and permissions)
- Accessing your web pages
Note: On June 23, 2008, UITS will retire Steel. As part of this process, UITS will move the Mypage service to a new platform. For more, see ARCHIVED: About the Mypage migration.
Introduction
This document offers a very broad overview of using Steel to publish personal web pages on Mypage at Indiana University. Once you create an account on Steel, and then create a web directory, you can place files in that directory to publish them as web pages. The sections below cover these actions in detail and in the order in which you will need to do them.
Steel is not the only option for hosting web pages at IU, but it is the main server of personal pages. Some IU departments provide their own web servers; additionally, departments, student organizations, and other groups within IU can use the main university web servers for their official web pages. For more information about web publishing options, see Publish on the web at IU
Note: The IU South Bend Mypage service is different from the Mypage service noted here; see IUSB's Web Publishing: Mypage.
Getting a Steel account
If you do not have an account on Steel, you will need to create one. To do so, see Get additional IU computing accounts
Mypage serves your personal web pages from your NFS directory. UITS provides tools on Steel to facilitate creating and editing your web pages. These tools are detailed in the next sections.
Preparing your Steel account
Once you have an account on Steel, you will need to select a login shell. Connect to Steel using SSH and log in with your IU Network ID. (If you need to obtain an SSH client, see SFTP clients recommended for use at IU) To connect to Steel, next to "Host Name:" enter
steel.ucs.indiana.edu
Next to "User Name:" enter your IU Network ID username. Enter your Network ID passphrase when prompted.
After logging in successfully, enter 5
to
select the bash
shell. In five minutes or less the
setting will take effect, and you can continue preparing your Steel
account. You will need a subdirectory in your home directory named
www
. Only files in your www
directory, or
in its subdirectories, are accessible on the web. No other files in
your Steel account will show up on the web. The simplest way to create
your www
directory is to use the spinweb
command. To do so, at the Unix prompt on Steel, enter:
spinweb
The spinweb
utility is a locally developed program that
takes care of several mundane tasks associated with setting up web
pages on IU computers. Among other things, the spinweb
command creates a www
directory if one does not exist,
and places in it a file called home-template.html
, which
can be used to design your web page; finally, it sets file permissions
within the directory so that others may read the pages within it.
To change to your www
directory, at the prompt enter
cd www
.
Note: Since Steel uses the Unix operating system, you will need to be familiar with some basic Unix commands. For starters, see Introduction to Unix commands and Unix online tutorials
After you have entered the spinweb
command, you should be
able to view your page with a web browser. However, when
you get a new Steel account, there may be an initial delay of up to
six hours before your web pages are viewable.
Creating web pages
Web pages are ordinary text files that also contain some special instructions, or tags, to tell web browsers how to handle the text. For example, some tags create links or give text a special appearance. These tags constitute HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
For example, if Luke Skywalker ran spinweb
, his
home-template.html
file would look like this:
<HTML><HEAD> <!-- This is a comment. It won't show up in a web browser. --> <TITLE>Sample Personal Home Page for Luke Skywalker </TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Sample Personal Home Page for Luke Skywalker</H1> <!-- Your name here comes from your finger information (set by chfn). --> <P> does not yet have a personal web page. <!-- Put whatever you want here. --> </BODY></HTML>
If Luke chose to edit his home-template.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> <!-- Add link to Death Star plans soon. --> </BODY> </HTML>
You can create a web page with any of the several text editors on
Steel, including Pico, Emacs, and
vi. If you are familiar with any of these Unix editors,
this is probably the easiest and most convenient way to create or edit
your pages. For example, enter emacs home-template.html
to use Emacs to edit the template home page file created by
spinweb
.
Note: If you edit the template file created by
spinweb
to create your home page, you may want to rename
it from home-template.html
to simply
home.html
. To do so, at the Unix prompt, enter:
mv home-template.html home.html
You can also create web pages on your computer at home 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.
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 an HTML editor on a home, office, or Student Technology Center (STC) computer, you will need to transfer the file or files to Steel.
Finally, you can also use HTML programs specifically designed for creating web pages. These programs help you manage HTML tags and format your text. You can find a massive list of HTML editors at:
http://www.tucows.com/
In the "Search Software Library" box, type HTML
editor
. Then, from the drop-down menu, select your
operating system, and click .
If you use an HTML editor with built-in file-transfer capabilities, you can upload files to Steel only if the program permits secure file transfer. For help, consult the software's documentation.
Some good introductions to HTML are available on the web, including those listed below:
You can also learn a great deal about HTML by looking at the source text (text coded with HTML tags) 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 ARCHIVED: How can I view the HTML code of web pages?
Transferring web pages
If you created your web page on Steel from within your
www
directory, 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 Steel. You need to use a secure FTP (SFTP) program such as MacSFTP for Mac OS or Mac OS X, or SSH Secure Shell for Windows.
For specific instructions for transferring files, see:
- 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 permissions)
As mentioned earlier, your web pages must be inside the
www
subdirectory of your home directory.
You must also make sure your files and directories have the correct
permissions before they will be available on the web. The easiest way
to do this at IU is by using spinweb
. 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
Alternately, you can set proper permissions by using the Unix
chmod
command. For more information, see ARCHIVED: How do I create subdirectories of my www directory for my web
pages?
Accessing your web pages
All pages on the World Wide Web have a unique address called a URL (Universal Resource Locator). For your web pages on Steel, the URL will always begin with:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/
Replace username
with your actual username. This URL will
take you to the home.html
file in your www
directory. Thus, the full URL for your home page will be the
following, with username
replaced by your username:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/home.html
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
secrets.html
, the URL for the secrets.html
page would be:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~dvader/secrets.html
If the file is inside a subdirectory of the www
directory, then its URL includes the name of that directory, the
/
(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
If you have a file named home.html
in your
www
directory on Steel, this page will be automatically
listed in IU's Directory of
Personal Home Pages. For more information about using this
directory, see ARCHIVED: Add or remove a link from the IU Directory of Personal Home Pages to a web page
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Last modified on 2018-01-18 10:10:09.