Department of Engineering

How to create unofficial web pages

Your personal web space

If you have an account on the CUED Teaching System, you can create unofficial web pages in your own personal web space there. It is very strongly recommended that you do not use this space for 'official' pages - pages for your research group, research projects and the like. But it provides a very easy way of publishing unofficial material on the web.

Setting up your web directory

The first thing that you need to do is to create the directory that will hold your web pages. Log on to the Teaching system (at a terminal in the DPO, or using ssh to connect to gate.eng.cam.ac.uk), and type the following commands:

mkdir ~/public_html
chmod o+rx ~/public_html
chmod o+x ~

This will create the directory, and make it and your home directory accessible to the web server. You're now ready to publish your pages.

If you create sub-directories under public_html they will also need to be visible to all. For example, if you create a sub-directory in public_html called images, you'll need to do "chmod o+rx ~/public_html/images" and make the files it contains readable by everybody.

Publishing your web pages

See the information on producing material for the WWW for help on the actual writing of web pages. The University Computing Service also runs courses in web authoring.

After you have written a page, place the file in the web directory that you created above. (If you are a PC user, you may want to read the information on accessing your home directory from a Windows PC. But you will still need to log on to the Teaching System to carry out the following steps.)

You then need to change the access permissions on the file, so that the web server can read it. To do this, type the command

chmod o+r filename

Replace filename with the name of the file that you have just added. You will need to alter the permissions like this on any file that you add to your web directory. (Depending on how you update pages, you may also need to repeat this command after editing a page. So if you encounter an 'access denied' message after updating a page, use the above command.)

Once the page is in your web directory, and you have altered the permissions as above, you should be able to see the page in a web browser. The URL of the page, which you can quote to others, will be

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~userid/filename

Replace userid with your userid, and filename with the name of the file. Note that you must include the tilde ('~') immediately before your userid.

You should call your home page 'index.html'. This file is treated specially by the web server: if someone requests the URL http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~userid, the server will send back the file index.html.

You should read the Departmental Guidelines on the World Wide Web, which set out guidelines and restrictions on the publication of material on the web.