Creating Personal Pages

Web Design > Creating Personal Pages

At Columbia, everyone with a CUNIX account can place documents in their account space and make them available through the Web. Use of your CUNIX account in this way is dependent on your reading and understanding University policies and guidelines, including the Computer Accounts & Policies. Columbia University does not sponsor, review or monitor the contents of the personal home pages of its faculty, students or staff on World Wide Web sites using University facilities, nor does the University endorse the contents of any such personal home pages.

Departments and student organizations can create official web pages on Columbia Web by requesting server space for an official Web Site. If you are creating an "official web site" you must be assigned a directory outside of your personal account. Please see the instructions for creating an official site at Columbia.

To create your personal homepage you need to do three things:

Create a world-accessible directory called public_html within your CUNIX account. You may already have this directory.
Create HTML documents on CUNIX or on your computer.
Move all files into your public_html directory and make them world-accessible.

Creating a World Accessible Directory

Create the directory and set the protection so that it is world readable. To do this, you must telnet to your CUNIX account and type three commands (skip the second if you already have a public_html directory):

$ chmod a+x ~
$ mkdir ~/public_html
$ chmod a+rx ~/public_html

Creating Your HTML documents
Your personal home page would normally be called index.html. That will make it the default file that is shown to a visitor to your site. The file called index.html is called your home page, because this is the starting point for access to your Web pages.

The address, or URL (uniform resource locator), used to reach

~user/public_html/index.html

would be

http://www.columbia.edu/~user/

To access the other Web pages in your directory the user would have to follow a link from your home page, or type the complete URL including the file name

http://www.columbia.edu/~user/filename.html

Moving Your Files & Making Them World Accessible

If you need to move files from your computer into your public_html directory please see our instructions for using FTP. If your files are in the proper place on the server already, please see our instructions for setting permissions so that your files are world accessible.

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