How to Create Web Pages at Columbia

Columbia University does not sponsor, review or monitor the contents of the personal home pages of its faculty, students or staff on World Wide Web sites using University facilities, nor does the University endorse the contents of any such personal home pages.

To create pages for viewing on the Web, you need to do four things:

1. Create a world-accessible directory called public_html within your CUNIX account.
2. Create HTML documents on CUNIX or your microcomputer.
3. Prepare multimedia files, if any.
4. Move all files into your public_html directory and make them world-accessible.

More detailed information on each of these steps follows.

1. Before you can create documents that you wish to make available through the Web, you must first prepare your CUNIX account appropriately. To create the public_html directory (you only need to do this once), type the following commands:

   	$ chmod a+x ~
   	$ mkdir ~/public_html
   	$ chmod a+rx ~/public_html
   

   The above commands make your home directory (referred to as ~) world searchable, create a public_html directory under your home directory, and then make the public_html directory world readable and world searchable.

   Setting up your directory in this fashion means that other users can see the filenames in your public_html directory. Or, if you prefer, you can restrict access so that the list of filenames in your directory is not visible to other users. The files are still visible to any user that knows the filename. You can restrict access to your filenames by omitting the "r" from the third command above:

   	$ chmod a+x ~/public_html
   

2. Documents on the Web are normally in a format called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Although there are some tools available to help you format HTML documents, you will probably need to learn some of the HTML "language." Click here for a beginner's guide to HTML.

   You can use any editor you like to create the text of your HTML pages. For example, on the CUNIX Cluster, you may use either pico or emacs. If you plan to use your microcomputer to create your HTML files and upload them to your CUNIX account later, make sure that you have your editor save files as plain ASCII text.

   When saving HTML files, do not use any spaces in the file names, and put .html at the end of each document name. For example, your personal home page would normally be called index.html. If you are working on a microcomputer on which you can't create a file name ending in .html, make sure to rename your files appropriately after uploading them to your CUNIX account.

   When you have finished formatting your documents, you may check them by launching a Web browser such as Netscape and using the Open File command on Netscape's File menu. This will allow you to view your pages and adjust their look and content before making them publicly available. If you are working from a microcomputer, you can test your documents before uploading them to your CUNIX account, assuming you have a copy of Netscape installed on your microcomputer.

3. Some Web browsers, such as Netscape, support the viewing of graphics or the playing of sounds. If you wish, you may place links to graphic or sound files in your HTML documents. If you do choose to make such files available, please follow these guidelines:
   • Graphics should be in gif format to ensure that people on all types of computers can view them.
   • Sounds should be in the au (uLaw) format.
   • Movies should be in mpeg format.
   • Graphics and sound files take up a great deal of disk space and network bandwidth. To preserve both of these resources, please use sound and graphics files sparingly, and make them as small as possible.

4. For any HTML file or sound, image, or movie file you wish to make public, move the files into your public_html directory (if they are not already located there), and modify their permissions to make them world-accessible. Any files on a microcomputer must be uploaded to the CUNIX Cluster at this point.

   For example, if you have created a file called index.html in your home directory, or have uploaded it to your home directory, and now want to make it accessible from the Web, type the following commands to move the file in to your public_html directory and make it world-readable:

   	$ mv ~/index.html ~/public_html/index.html
   	$ chmod a+r ~/public_html/index.html
   

List of Home Pages at Columbia

AcIS Web Documentation

• Use the CGI scripts installed on Columbia's Web server to add advanced Web features to your Web documents, including sensitive maps and email forms.
• Using Java at Columbia.
• Make your public_html directory a searchable directory.
• How to share Web files, or the basics of the UNIX groups feature.
  • a list of basic UNIX commands can be found in the CUNIX Cluster.
• How to restrict your Web files
  • to Columbia students, faculty, and staff
  • by username and password
• ColumbiaWeb Style Guidelines.
• A Color Code Table for changing background, text, and link colors in HTML 3.0 documents.
• Scanning Tips for 102 Philosophy.

Other Web Documentation

• Werbach's Bare Bones Guide to HTML
• NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML
• NCSA Beginner's Guide to URL's
• Jacobson's Color Table