How to Build a Web Page

Setting Up Your Account to Display Web Pages

1. Login to your account and enter the following at the prompt:

   pwd

   This command (print working directory) will show your current working directory. You should be in your home directory.

2. Determine whether or not you already have a directory called public_html in your home directory by entering the following at the prompt:

   ls

3. If public_html exists, make it the current directory by entering the following at the prompt:

   chdir public_html

4. If not, create a directory called public_html in your home directory by entering the following at the prompt:

   mkdir public_html

5. To view your new directory, and to show its permissions, enter the following:

   ls -l

   The directory name will appear on the far right side of the list while the permissions will be displayed on the far left side of the list.

6. To make the public_html directory readable and executable by all others, enter the following:

   chmod 755 public_html

7. To create a file within the public_html directory, you must first change directory to the public_html directory. Enter the following:

   cd public_html

8. To make sure you are located in the proper directory, enter the following at the prompt:

   pwd

   The output of this command should show:

   /export/grad/yourlogin/public_html

   You should be in your public_html directory.

9. To see a listing of contents of your public_html directory, enter the following at the prompt:

   ls -l

10. You should see a listing of all/any files in your public_html directory.

Creating the index.html File

1. If you can use the "save as" feature under the Netscape file menu to put the file in your public_html dir, then click template.html and save it as "index.html" in your public_html dir.
2. Alternatively, you may use a text editor such as emacs, pico or vi to enter the source code yourself. To do this click source.txt and paste or type this into your editor. Save the file as "index.html" (or "anything_you_want.html") in your public_html dir.

Making the index.html File Readable

1. Move back to the Xterm or telnet window and enter the following at the prompt:

   pwd

   This command (print working directory) will show your current working directory. You should be in the public_html directory.

2. To view the contents of the public_html directory, enter the following at the prompt:

   ls -l

3. To make the index.html file readable by others, enter the following at the prompt:

   chmod 644 index.html

4. The URL of your new page is:

   ~yourlogin

Important Things to Remember!

• If you are using a word processor program like WordPerfect to create your HTML documents, be sure to save the documents using the ASCII Text format.
• When creating pages for the Web, be sure that your files are located in your public_html directory and that you add the extension .html to each filename.
• Be sure to make all files readable by other (world readable).