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FAQs
 Creating and Modifying
Home Pages
 CSE WWW FAQ
References
 HTML 4.01
(W3C Recommendation)
 Web Server Docs
Tools
 Content Creation Tool
 Controlling Access
to Your Documents
   

Your home page is just a text file containing text and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) commands. To understand how to set it up, you need to know, therefore, about HTML, and about file locations.

By default, home pages are not accessible from outside the department. If you want yours to be readable by friends or colleagues elsewhere, you will also need to create an access control file. More on this below.

HTML

There are several ways to learn about HTML. The simplest is to select the "View Source" option of the "File" menu in your browser, which will display the HTML file that represents the current document. So, just choose a document that is somewhat like your desired home page, and take a look at it. There are options to even save the HTML to a text file, so you can use it as a template.

To find out more about HTML, try any of the documents listed in the University of Toronto's HTML bibliography, which includes everything from simple tutorials to complete references for the HTML language definition.

Please keep in mind that good HTML files always have the following basic structure: 

  <html>
  <head>
  <title>
                 the title of your document should go here
  </title>
  </head>
  <body>
                the text of your document should go here
  <address>
  yourname@cs.washington.edu    your address lives here
  </address>
  </body>
  </html>

Location

By default, your home page should live in the directory called "www" under your home directory.

For example, if you're a graduate student, your web directory will be: /homes/gws/yourname/www.

If you are a Professional Masters Program student: /homes/iws/yourname/www.

And, if you are an undergrad: /homes/iws/yourname/www.

Staff members: /homes/gws/yourname/www.

You'll need to create that directory yourself. Make sure that the web server can read the files there by ensuring that the directory is world-readable. For example,

% cd ~
% mkdir www
% chmod 0711 www

If you have any doubt about where this may be, or if it doesn't seem to work, send mail to webmaster@cs, and we'll arrange something.

Name

You can call your home page anything you want ("home.html" is one convention). However, to enable the links from the department's web, and to offer people a top-level index to your own web files, you should probably include an "index.html" (or "index.htm") file as well.

The Index File

Most of the links from the departmental web use the following URL's:/

http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/username/

When the server on www.cs gets a request for this document, it will look in your www directory for a file called "index.html".

Access Control

By default, home pages are not accessible from machines outside of the department. To make your page(s) readable by people elsewhere, you will need an access control file.

This file is called .htaccess, and controls access to the files in the directory in which it is found, and all those below it. You should therefore create a default .htaccess file in your main WWW directory.

The file's contents look like this: 

  order deny,allow
  deny from all
  allow from all

In the example shown, access is granted to any machine, anywhere. A more restrictive version that only allows people from the University of Oregon and from the Intel Corporation might look like this: 

  order deny,allow
  deny from all
  allow from oregon.edu intel.com

If you want different access controls for subdirectories in your own web, create a .htaccess file in one or more of the relevant subdirectories, with the appropriate commands in it.

To read more about access control files, try the Apache documentation or read this.

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