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You will need to be familiar with basic UNIX commands in order to understand the following instructions. If not, take a look at the manual pages for the following commands: ls, mkdir, chmod. Use the "man" command to read a man page. The first step is to check the permissions on your home directory and create a .www directory within it.
To create your webspace, the first step is to check permissions on your home directory and create your .www directory within it. This is the place where all your webpages will reside.
Make sure your home directory is world executable, then create a .www directory in it. The .www directory must be world-executable so the web server can read your webpage. It must not be world-writable or group-writable. This is because if others are allowed to write to this directory, they could execute code in your webspace. Set the permissions like this:
% chmod 701 ~ % mkdir ~/.www % chmod 701 ~/.www
In your .www directory you can create your homepage, PHP-enabled webpages or CGI scripts. These tutorials will help you:
This is a text file called index.html within your .www directory. If you want to edit the html directly, you can use a text editor such as xemacs, emacs, pico or vi:
% cd ~/.www % xemacs index.html
This will call up the xemacs text editor. Please note, you can use any text editor to create and edit the index file, e.g. emacs, pico, vi, etc. Cut and paste the following into xemacs:
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"
lang="en">
<head>
<title>Hello world</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>
This is my homepage.
</p>
</body>
</html>
Check permissions on all your .www directory files. Anything you want readable on the Web needs to be 644 (world readable). For example, after you create your index.html file above, do:
% chmod 644 index.html
With your favorite browser, open:
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~<username>/
http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/~<username>/
Note the "~" in the url before your username.
If you are receiving errors, check the Error Logs for error documentation.
If you get an Internal Server Error, double-check that you followed all the steps above. If you still can't get it to work, contact Systems Staff.
University of Minnesota policy requires that the following disclaimer appear on all personal pages and on all student organization pages. It will be automatically appended to pages that you create:
"The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author. The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota."