Adding Your Own Home Page

Code all your pages in HTML. This can be accomplished in a number of ways. You could use an HTML add on to your favorite word processor, or use a dedicated HTML authoring tool, or use a text editor such as the one available through the pine mail program, the macintosh simple text, or windows notepad. Help with HTML codes, style guides, color codes, and other topics of interest to an HTML author you can try the werbach WWW help site. Tip: make sure that your filenames in your HTML document is in all lower case. A common problem experienced is not finding your graphics once you have transferred your files to the server. many times this is caused by the filenames in your HTML document being in uppercase and the filenames on the UNIX server being in lower case. The problem lies in the fact that the UNIX server sees PUBLIC.HTML as a different file from public.html but Macintosh and windows/DOS do not.

Tip: make sure that your filenames do not have any spaces in their names. Our server sees "my file.txt" as 2 files, the file "my" and the file "file.txt". Neither will work for the intended purpose.

The process of transferring your HTML documents to your account space is managed by using an FTP client. In your account space you will find a directory called public_html. Save your home page in your public_html directory. This directory is the only directory where your pages may reside. This is primarily a security consideration. You don't want access however trivial to your home directory. Saving your page to your public_html directory is a simple process if you use an FTP client such as the macintosh Fetch or WS_FTP for windows. WS_FTP for windows and the general process of using an FTP client is covered in depth in Using FTP to put a home page up. Other possibilities exist for transferring your files to the server. In some HTML authoring tools the transfer process is built right in. It is often referred to as the publish option or command. Tip: in Netscape gold the publish directory is not the URL that you use to access your pages but rather the path to your pages on the home file system. You may determine the path to your directory in a number of ways. One logon to the wcnet machine and use the manage your files option to determine your path name, or use a finger client on your own username, there are probably other ways. What you will find is a a path in the form of /home/71/username/ where the 71 may be any two digit number and the username will be the same as your login name.

Name your home page index.html. By naming your home page to index.html, you make your page the default for that directory. That is to say that when someone browses your URL http://www.wcnet.org/~jqpublic/ If an index.html is present it is displayed. Make sure that the file is named exactly index.html, not Index.Html or index.htm, or any other of the possible combinations. It should be all lower case and end in the four letter html ending.

Wait 1 day, the program that updates the Subscriber Pages runs late at night. Your Home Page is accessable already, just not in the Subscriber Page listing. Go to the Home Pages of our Subscribers Page , this is where your name will appear if you got all this right.

Your name should have been automatically added to the list. If you do not see your name here send email to the helpdesk.

Example of your home page URL

http://www.wcnet.org/~jqpublic/

More complete explanations of most of the terms and found in this document can be found elsewhere in these Help pages.

Please report problems with these pages to the Helpdesk pagemaster.