Exporting Information to the World Wide Web

If you have a College of ECT UNIX account, it is possible to export information to the World Wide Web without running your own http daemon or interacting with the system management staff. Here are some instructions:

First, create a web directory with the command "websetup". (NOTE: web directories now reside on the web server to increase proformance, simply creating a "public_html" directory in your home directory will no longer work.) All files created under public_html should be world readable. If you are not familiar with UNIX file permissions, read this warning.

In your web directory, the files BLURB and HIDDEN have special meaning:

Place up to 1K of description of your home page in BLURB and it will be included next to your name in the ECT Users Home Page Index.
If the file HIDDEN exists, your name will not appear in the ECT Users Home Page Index.

Websetup will let you create, delete, and edit these files.

At this point you can put any files you want to export to the web into your public_html directory and Web browsers can access them using the following URL (URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator).

http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~yourlogin

You can make subdirectories and they will be accessible too, provided that you make them world executable.

Alternatively, you can create a Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML) file called "index.html" in your public_html directory. Instead of automatically displaying a menu of files in your public_html directory, Web browsers will display the contents of index.html, which normally contains hypertext links to other files in your directory. For more information on HTML, consult the W3 Consortium's HTML page or A Beginner's Guide to HTML.

Note that our server, Apache httpd server, allows you to abbreviate hypertext links to enable you to move trees of HTML files around later without having to change all the references. Say you are in a subdirectory of your public_html directory called "foo" and you want to reference another file in foo called "blah.html". Instead of referencing

"http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~yourlogin/foo/blah.html"

use

"blah.html"

Or if you want to reference "bar.html" at the top level of your public_html directory from some lower level, instead of

"http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~yourlogin/bar.html"

use

"/~yourlogin/bar.html"

This document is maintained by Mike Kelly (tfsmiles@ecst.csuchico.edu)

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