Basic Web Pages - University of York Home Pages

How to Create a University Page

0.1 Logging into the Computers

The computers in the computer lab are all running Windows. You should be able to log in using your University user-id and password. Make sure the domain is set to CSRVADYORK.

0.2 Web Space

You should all have signed up for the "Personal web space" that the University offers. Your University filespace is mounted under Windows as drive "M" -- double-click on "My Computer" and then "abc500 on 'userfs' (M:)" to access it, where "abc500" is your user-id.

0.3 Your Home Page

If your web space request has been authorised (it can take up to an hour) then you will see a "web" directory in your M: drive. This is the directory the University web server looks in for your home page, and you will need to create a web page called "index.html".

0.4 Writing Your Home Page

You can use any text editor to write your home page. Word processors are usually not suitable, because it can be difficult to persuade them to write plain text without cluttering it up with font and formatting commands. Both Notepad and MicroEmacs are installed on these computers, but neither does syntax highlighting. A free alternative is Notepad2, simply click on the link to download a local copy to your computer.

0.5 Note on unsupported Windows machines, MacOS and Linux

If you're not using a University-supported Windows PC then you won't have an M: drive. I find the simplest way to create or edit web pages is to write them on your local machine, and then copy them over the network to a machine that does have access to the web directory, such as teaching0.york.ac.uk or research0.york.ac.uk.

You can use any of the many file-transfer programs to copy your files over, but as an example you could use "scp" under Linux or MacOS, e.g.:

scp my_webpage.html abc500@teaching0.york.ac.uk:web/

This copies the file "webpage.html" on my local computer to the "web" directory in the home space of user abc500 on teaching0.

0.6 Exercise 1

Now we have enough information to create a blank HTML page:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Create a blank page like this, and save it in your University web directory with the name index.html. You can view this page by going to the URL http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~abc100, where "abc100" is your user-id. You don't need to put "index.html" in the URL - this is the page the York web server gives by default.

Now add a title to your page.