Creating A Personal Web Page on Chow

• Home directories
  When you login to chow via telnet or ftp, you will be placed in a directory (directories are UNIX equivalents to Windows and Macintosh "folders") called your home directory. This location is referred to by the name ~userid, where userid is your account user name.
• Location of web page files
  You should store files relating to your web page in a directory called public_html inside of your home directory.
• Creating the web page
  You can use current versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer to create web pages. If you do that work on a personal computer, you can also use those programs to transfer the new files to your web server area. There are many other programs which do the same thing (such as Adobe Pagemill and Microsoft FrontPage). You can also use programs like Word to create html files that you can upload to your web site. Some folks like to use a simple text editor. It's up to you.
• The first page you should create
  If you put files into the directory ("folder") /home/userid/public_html, then they will be visible to people using the web address

  http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid
  

  The convention is to name the first file /home/userid/public_html/index.html so people can use the shorter address http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid. Otherwise they'll have to use http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid/something.html to specify a page, which is a bother. It is customary to use an index.html file in each directory in your public_html tree to act as a kind of welcome page or ... well, index to the contents of that directory.

• Setting the permissions
  In order for a file to be readable by the outside world, not only must the file permissions include world readability, but also the world must have access through the entire directory structure above the file. You can verify these permissions by using the ls -l command.
  
  For example, suppose a user "gwbush" executes from his or her home directory the command
  
  

  ls -ld public_html
  

  
  (The "d" option indicates we want the information about the directory itself, not its contents.)
  The output would be something like
  
  

  drwx--x--x 14 gwbush 1024 Mar 2 2001 public_html

  
  with the first field indicating the permissions. The last three characters in this field (--x) are the "world" permissions which in this case indicate that the world has no read (-) and no write (-) permissions for this directory, but does have access permission (x). This means that the world may open the directory to open its contents, even though it cannot list (read) or add or delete (write) files in that directory.
  
  Consider now a subdirectory "course" in public_html. We want to look at a listing of its contents. Suppose the output of the command (note no "d" option this time)
  
  ls -l public_html
  
  is this:
  
  drwx--x--x 14 gwbush 1024 Mar 8 2001 course

  
  The permissions are the same as for the public_html directory explained above. To see what happens inside the "course" directory, we try (again from the home directory)

  ls -l public_html/course
  
  whose output might look like this:
  

  -rw-r--r-- 1 gwbush 1767 Jan 4 2000 index.html
  -rw-r--r-- 1 gwbush 8048 Dec 6 1999 syllabus.html
  -rw------- 1 gwbush 1254 Feb 7 2000 secret_exam_solutions.tex

  
  Here, the world permissions are r-- for both index.html and syllabus.html; both of these files are world readable and have a clear access path to them all the way down, and so would be able to be viewed by a browser. However, secret_exam_solutions.tex has --- as its world permissions, so it is not accessible to the world (in fact, cannot be read by anyone but the owner). We recommend that any directory which does not need to be listed over the web be given permissions rwx--x--x and any file which does need to be read over the web rw-r--r--. These can be assigned by the commands
  

  
  chmod 711 <put the directory name here>
  

  and
  

  chmod 644 <put the filename here>
  

  respectively. To create a directory, like an archive of html files, whose contents you would like to list, you should use the command

  
  chmod 755 <put the directory name here>
  

  This adds read permissions, making the permission string rwxr-xr-x. If you do this, you must not have a file named index.html in the directory, as the web daemon will send the contents of the index.html file back to the browser if the directory is asked for. If there is no index.html file and the world read permissions are set, then a listing of the directory will be sent instead.