How to set up a Home Page on Xenon

In a few words

Create a public_html directory in your home directory (how?), and a index.html file (how?) in this directory, that will be your home page. This directory and all web files whould be world readable. If your login name is harish, your home page URL is

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~harish

Once you have setup your web page, you should register it in pedit.

If your home page is not on Xenon, the above address can still be used with the Redirect directive: Create a world readable .htaccess file in your public_html directory, and put just one line:

Redirect /~harish/ http://theory.stanford.edu/~harish/

The name Xenon.stanford.edu can still be used, but probably the one above is more standard

Detailled instructions

Creating a public_html file

Each user may serve documents from a personal public_html directory which contains the documents that they wish to make available on the web.

Note that public_html directory and all the documents in it must be world readable.

The cookbook steps you need to complete are:

Create the public_html directory: mkdir ~/public_html
note the underscore
Make the public_html directory accessible to the world: chmod 711 ~/public_html
Note that your home directory must be readable as well, otherwise the subdirectory is inaccessible.

Creating an index.html page

Copy the standard home page from the WWW user:

     cp ~www/templates/simpleindex.html ~/public_html/index.html
     chmod a+rx ~/public_html/index.html

Note that the files in the public_html directory must be readable as well. If you are getting 403 FORBIDDEN messages when trying to access your new page through a web browser, then your file is not readable by the server, or the directory it is in is not searchable (no read/execute bit set) by the server.

There are a few other templates in the same directory as well. Don't forget to edit the files after copying (unless you like being known as Joe Random).

More about HTML

You will probably be able to use a HTML editor, in which case you won't need to know anything about HTML. To learn about this language (?), a a tutorial is available, and some examples of usage.

If you know HTML well enough, choose these four fast configuration steps to get you started writing HTML using Emacs's HTML mode.

If you are really interested, the gory details of how documents are served through the web is summarised for you.

Other:

An icon collection has been compiled for general usage on WWW-CS.stanford.edu - not on xenon.

Questions: Please e-mail to:

webmaster-student@CS.Stanford.EDU

(Last update: October 2, 1997)