Creating a home page

If you want to create your own home page in the School of Computer Studies then there's no better place to start than the Beginner's Guide to HTML. You should find you can set up a home page in a matter of minutes. Another excellent tip is that if you like something on someone else's page, steal it. Use the View Source option (under Mosaic's File menu and Netscape's View menu) to see how other people wrote their pages.

Although undergraduates at Leeds don't generally have their home pages on the Web this isn't really a problem. The most useful function of a home page is to serve as your own well-made hotlist to point to other Web sites of interest. Write your home page as an HTML file called, say, ~/WWW/home.html. Make sure you set the permissions by using the UNIX commands

chmod a+x ~/
chmod a+x ~/WWW
chmod a+r ~/WWW/home.html

Then if your username is sam, for example, the local Web address of this file is

file://localhost/home/csgi/sam/WWW/home.html

(This is only for the SGIs. For the Suns replace the csgi with csun.) You can now open this file from Mosaic. Also, it's nice to add the following line to the end of your ~/.cshrc file

setenv WWW_HOME file://localhost/home/csgi/sam/WWW/home.html

Now whenever you click on your browser's Home button it will take you to your home page.

The only people who can access this page are you and anyone else with an account on the same machine. This means you don't really have a home page on the Web, just a home page for your own benefit. If you aren't satisfied with this then before lobbying your user rep you should consider what you'd want to put on your Web page that makes global access so important. This isn't to say that it should always be forbidden, only that it's not as important as some people think.

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