Setting up personal webpages

There are five steps involved in setting up personal webpages (not including the writing of the pages).

  1. Create a directory in your homedirectory to put the pages in. Usually people call this directory public_html or www although it can be called anything you like. If you like you can put some files in there right away.
  2. Make sure this directory is "world-readable" (for the web-server to serve it)
  3. Make sure your webpages are written in an accessible format. This means that anyone using an alternative web-browser for example one which reads out the text, or one which shows no graphics can parse the xhtml code on your page. Check for accessiblity by making sure the pages correctly run through the validator. Files can be uploaded directly to the valiator. If your files fail, you can tidy them using the tidy command which is installed on the linux computers. The syntax is tidy --asxhtml file.html > newfile.html
  4. The URL (web address) for your personal page will be of the form: 
    http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/loginname
    where loginname is replaced by your actual DAMTP login name.
  5. Most DAMTP accounts have this url automatically setup, however if it does not work please email webmaster@damtp asking for personal webpages to be set up for you.

The main index-page in your web directory needs to be called index.html otherwise when people navigate to your site they will just see a list of all files in your web directory.

Remember that the directory you put your HTML files in, and the files themselves, must be "world-readable", so if your homedirectory is by default not readable to everyone on the system, you will need to change it to be so. And then check if the individual files/directories you don't want to be world-readable in it to be made private.

The server which your webpages are kept on is case sensitive. For example MyPage.html and mypage.html would not be seen as the same file by it.

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