Creating Personal Web Sites

To create a personal web page on the Computing and Communications (C&C) web server
     you will need an email account, Morgan or Plato account, which can be obtained from C&C (HH2012).

1. Design and create your page.
   This can be done either by using an HTML editor or by using web page creation software e.g. FrontPage or Netscape Composer.
   Note: Save your home page under the filename index.html.

   The index.html file is the first page that loads when someone visits your web page.
   

   Almost all home pages are named index.html so that a visitor\'s Web browser will automatically load it.

2. Create a .www directory, and set permissions on it.

Before you can transfer the files you need to create a directory in your Plato account where those files can be stored. You also need to set the correct permissions on this directory


1. Log on to your Plato account using your username and password.
2. Type the command cd at the prompt (e.g. plato>cd) and press enter.
3. Type mkdir  .www (with a space between the “mkdir” and “.”) and press enter.
4. Type chmod a+x . .www and press enter.
5. Type ls -la and you should see the following permissions set on your .www directory:

drwx------ 2 username undergrad 4096 date time .www

Note: Try not to do this procedure more than once as it may create unwanted directories and subdirectories. 

3. Transfer your files. The next step is to transfer the files to the .www directory you just created. This requires a program called a 'file transfer protocol'.
   

• I recommend WS_FTP from Ipswitch, trial versions are available at www.ws-ftp.com<>



4. Set permissions on the files. Each file that you place in the .www directory will need permissions set on it so that visitors to your web page will be able to read/view the files.
1. Log on to your Plato account
2. Type plato>cd ~/.www o enter the .www directory:
3. To list all the files in your .www directory, type ls
4. Type the following command to set the permissions on the files:

1. Repeat for each file in the directory*

With the above steps completed, your web page should be available to the world.

     (e.g. if the user name is jdoe then your address will be www.ucs.mun.ca/~jdoe).

*If you do a listing of the files in your .www directory you should see the following permissions set on your files:

plato> ls -la

-rw-r--r-- 1 username undergrad 1701 May 9 09:31 index.html

-rw-r--r-- 1 username undergrad 2551 May 6 10:18 image.jpg

-rw-r--r-- 1 username undergrad 2551 May 6 10:18 image2.gif

The three r\'s in the permission set for a file, as shown above, indicate that the file is readable or viewable to anyone who visits your web page.

Note: If you add new files or update existing files in your .www directory, make sure they have the correct permissions set on them.

©2003 by C&C, Memorial University; abridgement by Steven M. Carr