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ICT | Guides | Web Service | A Personal Homepage


 
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February 2012
 
  last update
09 - 11 - 2004
 
 

 

Creating A Personal Homepage

Introduction

Maintaining a set of WWW documents in your home directory is an option that enables the users to make their contributions to the World Wide Web. Users are enabled to present information on whatever topic they choose, it being research projects, hobbies, sports, fan clubs or whatever they choose.

This document describes how a user should go about setting up a personal set of pages, and making them available to the Web. Or to part of the Web, where appropriate.

Responsibility

Personal homepages are maintained by individual users. Each user is responsible for his own personal homepage.

The faculty cannot be held responsible for the contents of personal homepages.

When creating your personal homepage, please note that not everything you find on the Web is "up for grabs". Copyright holders can put text, images or sound on the Web, but copying that information and pasting it into your own Web pages may be a copyright infrignement.

An accessible directory

Documents on the Web are distributed by HTTP `daemons'. In a most UNIX environments, the daemon runs under root permission, and handles requests from clients under a neutral users permission. Files that are to be distributed across the Web should therefore be `world readable', so the neutral user can access them.

The daemon configuration at the FNWI accesses the public_html directory in the home directories of the users. The access permission of this directory should be at least executable for the `other' users, as should the users home directory. A set of examples will illustrate.

Making the directory


% cd
% mkdir public_html
%
or run the create_homepage script 
% create_homepage
Created /home/user/public_html
Created /home/user/public_html/index.html
%

Checking the accessibility


% ls -ld ~/ ~/public_html/
drwxr-x--x 25 user         1536 Nov  7 16:25 /home/user/
drwxr-xr-x  2 user          512 Oct 27 08:58 /home/user/public_html/
%

The permissions do not have to look exactly like these.

Changing to the correct permissions

% chmod o+x ~/
% chmod o+rx ~/public_html/
%
or run the create_homepage script 
% create_homepage
Changed permissions on /home/user
Changed permissions on /home/user/public_html
Changed permissions on /home/user/public_html/index.html
%

The address (URL) of your homepage

The URL to your document looks like:

http://fileserver.science.uva.nl/~loginname/

Where fileserver is your fileserver and user is your login name.

Note that it does not matter on which FNWI system your personal homepage is. Each night a daemon collects all addresses for personal homepages and builds a database that the FNWI web servers use. All homepages seem to be located on www.science.uva.nl, even though they may be anywhere in the FNWI networks.

The URL to your homepage that you can put on businesscards, and tell to your friends is:

http://www.science.uva.nl/~user/

Even if you move to a different computer system, the WEB server will find your homepage once the database is rebuilt overnight.

Making documents

When a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is specified without a specific filename, our FNWI daemon configuration will first attempt to access a document in that directory named index.html. If that file does not exist, the server will produce a list of files in the directory. When present, the list is preceded by the file HEADER, and followed by the README. These two files will not be listed `as file'.

The documents are commonly written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Files in HTML have the extension .html. For copy/paste purposes, the creation of an skeleton HTML file is demonstrated:

% cat > index.html
<HTML>
<!-- Authors comments -->
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Fill in the document title here</TITLE>
</HEAD>

<BODY>
<H1>Large heading</H1>

Whatever you want to make clear.<P>

<HR>
<A HREF="/~user/"><ADDRESS>user@science.uva.nl</ADDRESS></A>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Finish by typing a Control-D.


Disabled Features in Homepages

For security considerations, several standard features of the HTTP daemon are disabled in user directories. Most important and inquired after feature, is the script execution feature. Scripts in user directories can not be executed. There is an alternatives however for handling forms. A script is provided that will send mail to a specified user, containing all the fields in the form. The source is also available.

For people with experience configuring HTTP daemons, this information explains more than 1000 words:

<Directory /*/public_html*>
AllowOverride Limit AuthConfig FileInfo Indexes
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks IncludesNoExec
<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
allow from all
</Limit>
</Directory>

Documentation on modifying access permissions is available.


What you are not permitted to do

More specifically: what types or information should not be on the Web? Most information can be made available on the Web. However, we feel that extreme political opinions, pornographic images, and copyrighted material should not be on our server.

The system management reserves the right to remove any document they feel violates this last rule.