July 2009

Create a Personal Home Page at UWO

Contents

• Introduction
• Before You Begin
• Steps to Publishing on the Web
  1. Activate My Personal Web Space
  2. Write your home page in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
  3. Move the home page to server
  4. Test your home page
  5. Advertising your home page
• See Also

Introduction

Before You Begin

Before you begin, read the following questions and answers.

Question: Do I have a personal computer account?

Yes, more than likely you do. All faculty, staff, and students at Western are eligible to have a Personal Computer Account. Students have an account automatically created for them. If you do not yet have an account, please see How do I... Get a Personal Computer Account to find out how to obtain your account.

Question: Where will my home page be located?

Your home page will be stored in a directory called public_html in your personal disk space on the Western server. Everyone with a Personal Computer Account is allotted a 20MG disk space quota of central file storage. (Email quota is not part of this disk space quota.) allocated 20 MB. Part of this disk space can be used to store your web documents including your html files and images. The page about Quota questions and answers will give you more information about your personal disk space on the Western server.

Question: What program should I use to create my home page?

You can use a word processor like Microsoft Word, or WordPerfect, which converts files to html or any other word processor or editor, such as Notepad, that you are comfortable with. Commercial packages such as Dreamweaver are commonly used.

Whatever program you use, you must make sure that the HTML document you create is a plain text file (also called an ASCII or ASCII DOS text file).

Question: How do I get my home page document from my PC or Mac computer to the Western server?

A file transfer program is used to move the document from your computer (or a lab computer) to server. If you are using a Windows, you can use S-FTP a secure file transfer program to perform the file transfer; if you are using a Macintosh, you can use Mac SSH. The software for the PC program is available for download from here. You will need to enter your Personal Computer Account and password in order to download this software.

Question: How will other people find my page?

Anyone, anywhere on the Internet will be able to access your home page.

The web server has been configured so that your web address (also called a URL for Uniform Resource Locator) will be in the form:

http://publish.uwo.ca/~login-name/

e.g. http://publish.uwo.ca/~jdoe/
 

Your home page can be viewed with any Internet browsing program such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari.

Question: What is appropriate content for my web pages?

• Western faculty, staff, and students can create web pages for the World Wide Web to disseminate information relevant to their roles in the University. See the document University's Mission.

  Individuals (faculty, staff, and students) will be responsible for the content of personal pages. Information made available via this service must meet the content policies defined by the Western Acceptable Use Agreement which you signed when you first activated your account.

• Remember that Web pages are public; don't put in information that people could use to hurt you. Your Web pages describe you and your interests to the world so put some thought into how you represent yourself. Consider that potential future employers may read your Web pages.

• Step 1, which follows, provides a simple template to help you get started.

Steps to Publishing on the Web

Step 1 - Create a Personal Web Space

You must first create (activate) a special directory in your personal web space on publish.uwo.ca where you will store your html files and image files. You will only have to do this once. To set up your web space, go to the online form Activate My Personal Web Space.

The first time this activation is done, it creates a directory called public_html in your personal disk space. It also creates a default home page by copying the Western Publish template to the file index.html within your new public_html directory. It then sets appropriate permissions on the directory and files within so that the web server can read them.

If the directory public_html and the file index.html already exist, then only the permissions will be set. The index.html file will not be overwritten.

Open a browser (e.g. Firefox, IE) and check to see whether you can access your homepage at http://publish.uwo.ca/~login-name/ It should look like the template in this document. If you can view this page, everything is set up correctly.

The following is the Publish template that is put into your public_html directory when you first activate your personal web space.

Firstname Lastname's Home Page e-mail:login-name@uwo.ca Here's a Bit about Me... Type information about yourself here. This could include your area of study, hobbies, special interests, favourite sayings, or whatever else you like. Favourite Web Pages While not essential, just about everyone includes a link or two to sites they really like. The list of links below is created using an unordered list. Information Technology Services Home Page ITS Help Desk Last revised: xx/xx/xx

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Firstname Lastname's Home Page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1>Firstname Lastname's Home Page</H1> <ADDRESS> e-mail:login-name@uwo.ca </ADDRESS> <HR> <H2>Here's a Bit About Me...</H2> Type any information about yourself here. This could include your area of study, hobbies, special interests, favourite sayings, or whatever else you like. <H2>Favourite Web Pages</H2> While not essential, just about everyone includes a link or two to sites they really like. The list of links below is created using an unordered list. <UL> <LI><A HREF="http://www.uwo.ca/its/">Information Technology Services Home Page</A> <LI><A HREF="http://www.uwo.ca/its/helpdesk/">ITS Help Desk</A> </UL> <HR> Last revised: xx/xx/xx </BODY> </HTML>

Figure 1 - A simple structure for a basic home page.

Figure 2 - The HTML code that produces the home page in Figure 1.

Step 2 - Write your home page in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

Web files are created by inserting Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) formatting codes into a plain text file. HTML formatting codes are enclosed in angle brackets, i.e., < >, and are referred to as tags or tag pairs. Each code or tag pair consists of a beginning tag which turns formatting on, and an ending tag which turns formatting off. For example, the code for bold text would start with a <b> tag, followed by the text to be bolded, followed by a closing </b> tag to turn bolding off.

If you create your HTML file on your computer using a text editor, HTML editor, or HTML translator you must then use a secure file transfer program to move your file to the Western server.

The easiest way to get your first home page ready is to use the default homepage that was created from the "Activate My Personal Web Space" page. Substitute your personal information in the appropriate places. You can download a copy of this file (called index.html) from your public_html directory to your own Mac or PC using a file transfer program (Secure FTP). This allows you to make your modifications with your favorite editing tools. You can also edit the index.html file on the server if you are familiar with an editor such as pico, emacs or vi.

• Creating an HTML file on a PC or Mac
  1. Use your operating system editor or your favorite word processor to edit your html document. You will need to type in both the text and the HTML tags. The file is saved as text (ASCII) with an .html (preferred) or .htm extension. Example of system editors:
     • Windows - notepad
     • Mac - Simpletext

  2. Use an HTML Editor or translator. HTML editors allow you to insert HTML tags at the click of a button. Translators hide the codes from you allowing you to create the file with formatting as you would in any word processor and let the package translate your file into HTML.

     The following examples are a sampling of what is available.

     • PC - Dreamweaver, WordPerfect, MS-Word
     • Mac - HTML Editor, MS-Word

  You can preview your page by opening a browser and choosing the Open File command under the File menu, then navigate to select your home page document from your computer. You can now see what your home page will look like on the web. If there are any errors, correct them and resave the document.

The sample home page contains only very basic HTML formatting codes. If you want to learn more advanced HTML, check out the information available in the UWO Web Resource Centre, Specialized Tools. The section Other Tools at the bottom of this page links to an extensive collection of tools and other information.

Step 3 - Move the Home Page to the Western server

Once you've created your HTML home page, the next step is to transfer the home page from your copmuter to public_html on the server using a secure file transfer program (S-FTP). The ITS-supported secure FTP program for Windows computers is called S-FTP and the Mac comes with its own implementation of a secure FTP program SSH Mac. The HTML file is an ASCII file, therefore, transfer in ASCII mode.

Note that you must transfer your files into the public_html directory. The file transfer usually sets the file protection to 'world readable'. If the permissions were not set this way during file transfer, you will need to correct this before you or anyone else can view your page. You can do this by returning to the Activate My Personal Web Space page and submitting your username and password again.

Note: If you are transferring images, you should click on the Binary button before transferring them to public_html.

Step 4 - Test Your Home Page

1. Once your home page is safely in public_html, visitors to your site will use the following web URL to view your page,

   http://publish.uwo.ca/~login-name/
   

   This only works if you keep the name of your homepage as index.html. Other files in your public_html directory can be accessed directly. If you named a page mypage.html, then it could only be accessed by going to the URL

   http://publish.uwo.ca/~login-name/mypage.html
   

2. To preview your home page, open a browser, type the URL in the Location box, then press Enter. Do you see any typing errors on the page? Have you thought of something else you would like to add? If so, you can return to Step 2 to make the changes in the original word processor or editor document, resave it, and FTP it again to the Web server.
3. Every document needs proofreading and checking for accurate HTML code, spelling, and links. You are assisted in these tasks by utilities found on the Checkers page (http://www.uwo.ca/IP/checkers.html).

Step 5 - Advertise your home page

Be sure to let people know that you have created a Web page and give them the URL.

Tip: Include your home page address in your e-mail signature file so everyone who receives a message from you can visit your page.

See Also

• Web Resource Centre
• How do I... documents for the Web
• Model Homes and templates, including a model CV and a model Faculty Member's Home Page.
• General Web Publishing Guidelines
• HTML and CSS Guides
• Unix information - including How do I... Get Started on Unix.
• Frequently Asked Questions

© 2009, The University of Western Ontario. Permission is granted to copy in whole or in part provided that due credit is given to the authors, the Division of Information Technology Services, and The University of Western Ontario.