Building your own web page
on the Calclab Machines

  1. Create a public_html directory in your home directory

    1. Go to a terminal window and type "cd" (without the quotes) at the prompt. This will move you to your home directory.
    2. Type "ls -l" to see what files are in your directory. You should see a line like
      drwxr-xr-x   3 mpilant  users         512 May  4 09:34 public_html/
      

      If not you must create a directory or change its file permissions.
    3. To create the public_html directory, type "mkdir public_html"
    4. To change its permissions, type "chmod 755 public_html"

  2. Create an index.html file in the public_html directory.

    1. Type "cd" to change to your home directory.
    2. Type "cd public_html" to change to your public_html directory.
    3. Download the template file (the one with Dilbert's picture in it) by goin to the home page, selecting "News", then sample home page. Click once in the frame containing Dilbert's picture, and then from the netscape menu select File->Save Frame As to open up a Save As.. dialog box. Double click public_html, and then save the file as index.html.
    4. Alternately, you can use an editor to create an index.html file. Choose an editor from the following list
      1. xedit - X-windows, mouse based editor (crude!)
      2. nedit - X-windows, mouse based editor (almost like notepad for Windows!
      3. vi - The venerable command line editor difficult to learn, but fast!
      4. emacs - THE editor for unix
      5. pico - good if you are used to pine
      6. Netscape HTML editor (only in 4.0 or later)
      Then create a file with the following lines in it:
      <html>
      <body bgcolor=white background="background.gif">
      <title> TITLE GOES HERE </title>
      <center>
      <img src="IMAGE.gif" border=0>
      </center>
                       ...Information here ....
      </body>
      </html>
      
      The <html> and <body> tags are necessary. The &l;ttitle> is optional, as is the <img ...> tag. The arguments to the <body> tag are optional. See the html reference in the menu for the complete description of the html commands.

  3. If you have created your web page on a different machine such as ugrad.math.tamu.edu, or unix.tamu.edu, you will need to copy all your files in the public_html directory over to calclab.math.tamu.edu

    The easiest way to do this is through ftp.