Making Information Available on the W3 at NIU Using This Server

Setting Up and Creating Documents

1. User home pages are stored in the directory
   /home/www/your_loginid/public_html
2. You may need to ask the system adminstrator to create this directory for you.
3. If needed, change the permissions on your newly-created directory to give read and execute permissions to "group" and "other". To do this, you should execute a command similar to chmod go+rx public_html
4. Place any HTML documents you would like to make available in this directory. You may create additional subdirectories under your public_html directory as you see fit to organize your HTML documents (be sure to set their permissions also). Without creating a directory security file, ANY files in your public_html directory that have the "group" or "other" read permission set will be served up to users, so make sure anything you place in here you want to be seen by others.

   To access a file in your public_html directory, use a URL similar to "http://www.cs.niu.edu/~your_logonid/filename.html" (note that there is no reference to the public_html directory in the URL- -the server automatically maps ~your_logonid to ~your_logonid/public_html)

5. The file "index.html" is special, and can be referenced with the a URL similar to "http://www.cs.niu.edu/~your_loginid/".
6. This document is not meant to be a tutorial about HTML coding itself. A good source for this type of information is the A Beginner's Guide To HTML which contains most of the basic information one needs to create HTML documents
7. After creating a new document, be sure to change its permissions to make it publicly readable. To do this, you should execute a command similar to chmod go+r filename
8. When you modify or create an HTML document, always check it for syntax errors using one or both of the HTML checkers available on the system in the ~www/www_root/webutils directory

Restriction, Guidlines, Advice

• When placing information in your public_html directory, remember that you are obligated to follow the "Guidelines for System Use" found in /usr/local/lib/guidelines that Dr. Rickert has established for this system. In specific, please refrain from using profanity in your HTML documents and from placing sexually explicit material in your homepages. If you have any question as to whether the material you want to make available for public browsing violates any of these guidelines, it is your responsibility to ask either Dr. Rickert or myself before making those resources available
• By placing material in your public_html directory, you assume full responsibilty for any complaints about or action taken because of that material
• As a word of advice, the following things are generally considered to be a good idea to place in your HTML documents:
  • your name
  • your occupation/position
  • your e-mail address
  • your work office number and phone number (if you have these)
  The following are generally not considered to be a good idea:
  • your home address
  • your home phone number
  • your marital status
  • any very detailed, personal information
  There have been cases of people (esp. women) being harrassed, both electronically and physically, by other people whom they met on the Internet. This is not meant to make anyone overly paranoid, but to advise newcomers that a healthy amount of common sense is in order when making information about yourself publicly available to >50 million people.

Other Info/Tips/Hints

• When creating HTML documents, use vi as your editor instead of pico--pico's word wrapping feature may cause the URLs you code to be split between two lines and cause syntax errors for browsers
• When placing links in your documents to other documents in your HTML directory(s), use relative pathnames to those documents instead of absolute pathnames. This would allow you to move an entire directory structure of documents without needing to modify the URLs in those documents. Given the evolving nature of our W3 site, it may be necessary to make such a move in the near future
• When placing links in your documents to other peoples' documents on our system or to an image in the "http://www.cs.niu.edu/graphics/" directory, use absolute or userid (i.e., "~userid") pathnames instead of relative (i.e., "..") as these files (probably) will not move
• Your homepage document should, by convention, be in your public_html directory and be named "homepage.html". By naming it this, the server will provide your homepage by default if only your public_html directory is specified in a URL (i.e., a URL such as "http://www.cs.niu.edu/~your_logonid/")
• A template document which adheres to the NIU HTML Coding Standards is available as ~www/www_root/html_coding/template.html and may be freely copied and used as an outline for your own HTML documents. There is a document called ~www/www_root/graphics/graphics.html which contains a link to all of the images that are available to use in your HTML documents. All of these images are stored in the "http://mp.cs.niu.edu/graphics/" directory
• To find additional information about the W3, there are four newsgroups available on our system that you can read: comp.infosystems.www.announce, comp.infosystems.www.users, comp.infosystems.www.providers, and comp.infosystems.www.misc. They are all high-volume newsgroups with a tremendous amount of cross-posting between them. For the average W3 user/HTML coder, c.i.w.m. and c.i.w.a. are probably the best ones to focus on trying to read regularly
• Announcements about the HTTP server (such as enhancements, bug fixes, and scheduled down-times) will be made to the newsgroup niu.cs.general. Answers to general W3 questions as well as user support for the server will also be provided through this group. It is probably worthwhile to read this group regularly to keep up to date about W3 here at NIU. One way to do this would be to add a line to your .login file such as rn -c niu.cs.general which will check to see if there are any unread articles each time you log in, printing a message if there are

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