o^3 Cubic Circle

How to create your own home page

And on the seventh day, he announced his URL.

Questions and hints with respect to home pages you can find in the newsgroup cuci.www.

First, make sure you understand the conditions with regard to home pages.

In order to put up some home pages, you first have to create HTML files. This is best done off-line on your own computer, either using a simple ASCII editor, or using a special HTML/Web-editor. The server here makes available some extra tools and scripts which can be used to enhance your pages. Some things to keep in mind when creating files:

  • Every file containing HTML code should have a name that ends in .html or .htm.
  • The default home page file should be named index.html or index.htm (note, lowercase).
  • Try to give every page a title.
  • Make sure that references between pages and pictures use relative pathnames. I.e. in it's most simple form, use plain filenames, no directory separators or drive letters.
  • Type filenames in lowercase. Once your files are placed on the server here, the references and filenames become case sensitive. Keeping everything in lowercase saves you some headaches.
  • If you have images, pick a format that is most appropriate (read: a format that results in the smallest file size for the given picture). If the image contains large surfaces of exactly one colour (synthetic image), it's best saved as a gif file. If the image contains real-life pictures with many (slightly) differing colours, jpeg is the preferred format.
  • Every night, all home pages are checked, and the global overview files are updated automatically. The title mentioned in the main index file of your home page will be copied to the global overview.
Once you have created some files, they need to be uploaded to the server here. This can be done using any FTP program. A commonly used program is WS_FTP-light. When you, after downloading, unpacking and installing this program, start Cuciwiz and have clicked Finish in there, then there will be a preconfigured profile in WS_FTP which can be used to make a connection to the location of your own webpages. This profile is called "WWW homepage" (select it, then click Connect).

If you're using a different program, or if you can't find the profile, then have it connect to the host called ftp.cuci.nl, the username to use would be your own loginname, then enter your password on the prompt.

Once you're connected to the FTP server, you automatically land in your own home directory. You'll notice a subdirectory here called www. Change directory to this directory (should that prove impossible, try going to /home/jourloginname/www ) and transfer all files belonging to your home page to this www directory. Your home page should be immediately retrievable by entering the following URL in your WWW browser: http://www.cuci.nl/~yourloginname/