Note: Page under construction; errors likely; proceed at your own risk

Instructions for Creating a Web Page

This page contains some simple instructions for creating a web page and placing it on your condor (faculty) or shrike/students (students) account. It assumes no prior knowledge of HTML or FTP. All you need is a word processor or web editor to create a page, an FTP client to upload the page to your server, and perhaps a telnet or ssh client to log into your host and fix the file permissions if necessary.

There are much better ways to create web pages than those outlined here (Html-kit or Amaya, for example), but the instructions given here should work with the software you already have on your campus windows PC.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Create a web page

The easiest way is to simply create a page with your favorite word processor (like MSWord), just as you would any document. When finished, save the file as a web page (File - Save as Web Page in MSWord for example). Name the file index.html when you save it, and save it to the desktop or somewhere else that you can easily find it. The best idea would be to have a separate folder where you keep all your web pages.

You could also use a web editor to create your home page and other web pages, such as Html-kit, Amaya, or Netscape to create your page.

2. FTP the page to your account on condor.depaul.edu or students.depaul.edu.

Place it in the folder "public_html" - create a new folder by that name if it does not already exist.

How do I ftp something?

Look for one of the following programs on your Start Menu, and use one of them to upload your web page:

• File Transfer Protocol
• WSFtp, or
• Secure Shell Secure File Transfer. This is the preferred way to do it, because it is more secure than using regular ftp. Here are the steps to upload your web page:
  • Find the SFTP program on the Start Menu:
    Start - Internet Applications - Secure Shell - Secure Shell Secure File Transfer
  • Press "Enter"
  • Type condor.depaul.edu as the host name (or students.depaul.edu if you are a student).
  • Enter your username and password as prompted
  • Click on public_html in the left-most pane. If it does not exist, create a folder named public_html in your home directory.
  • In the menu at the top, click on??What was that?? and select upload file
  • Select the file to upload (index.html). It may ask if you want to overwrite an existing file if you already have a home page. Say yes to upload your new web page.

3. Open a web browser and type in the URL of your home page

Point your web browser (such as Internet Explorer) at http://condor.depaul.edu/~username (or http://students.depaul.edu/~username depending on which machine your acount is on) by typing that URL in the "address" window of the browser. (Substitute your own user name for username, but keep the tilde ~)

If your web page displays correctly, you're done! If not, you may need to go on to the next step

4. If the browser says "permission denied" then you must change the file permissions so that it will be readable. Here are the steps:

• Log into your account using telnet or ssh. SSH is preferred, because it is more secure. You can download a free SSH client called "putty" for your PC if it does not already have SSH. Just type "putty" into the search window at http://www.google.com to find a copy to download.
• Double-click putty on the desktop and then type in the host name (condor.depaul.edu or students.depaul.edu), your user name, and password when prompted to. Or on a campus machine select Start - Internet Applications - Secure Shell - SSH login from the Start menu.
• Enter your account name and password when prompted.
• Once you have logged into your account on condor, you should see a command prompt in a terminal window.
• Check the existing file permissions. Type the following command and hit Enter:

  ls

  This should list the files and folders you have. You should see one called "public_html". Type the following command to check the file permissions on this folder and its contents:

  ls -la public_html

  On the left of each line this command produces as output, you should see a string of some combination of the letters r, w, x, and dashes (plus maybe the letter d on the far left). These are the file permissions. For your web page to be visible to browsers, the rightmost 3 permission codes must include an "r" for the public_html directory and for every file in it. The directory itself must have an "r" and an "x" in the last 3 permission fields. If you do not see r and x where they need to be, you must change the file permissions.

• Change the permissions. The following two commands should do the trick:

  chmod -R ugo+r public_html

  chmod ugo+x public_html

• Then try reloading the page in your web browser. It should work now.

Other things you might want to do:

Add links to other web pages on your home page. In MSWord, highlight a word or phrase, then click Insert on the menu bar at the top of the page and select hyperlink.

Add additional web pages on your site. Simply create another HTML file, place it in your web directory, and create a hyperlink on your home page to the new file.