Setting up a Personal Home Page
for Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students
in the VU Math Department

This is an old web page that will have to be revised extensively when I have time, sometime soon. The instructions on most of this page would still apply to the new server at www.math.vanderbilt.edu. However, most members of our department do not need to use that server. Here are other servers for you to use:

For your research-related web page(s), we recommend Sitemason. Moreoever, each faculty member and graduate student in our department is required to create at least one Sitemason web page. You can find instructions for those pages here.
For your course-related pages, we recommend Blackboard.

Old Instructions

This document is written for two different audiences: beginners (people with no previous experience at creating web pages) and non-beginners. The document will indicate which sections you should read.

In either case, we assume that you have an account on Atlas, that you know how to access it, and that you know how to use some text editor (such as emacs or vi).

A 1-minute introduction to HTML

(Non-beginners can skip this.) An HTML file is a textfile, but with special display features encoded. For instance, if you want to display the words "Axiom of Choice" in boldface, you would put

<B>Axiom of Choice</B>

in the textfile. The browser program (Netscape, Explorer, Lynx, or whatever) reads the textfile and figures out that that phrase is supposed to be displayed in boldface. Most other features of HTML -- italics, links, tables, frames, etc. -- are encoded into the textfile in a similar fashion. Pictures are not encoded directly into the textfile, but we can encode pointers which tell the browser where to find the picture files. ... The easiest way to create an HTML document is to find one already present on the web that is similar to what you want. Then display its source file, copy it, and edit your copy. It's really just a textfile, after all.

Overview of our setup

Inside your home directory, we will create a subdirectory called "WWW" (note that it must be all caps). Your home page will be a file called "index.html" in your WWW directory. If you wish, you can also create other HTML documents in that directory, or (if you have many web pages) in subdirectories of that directory.

A few technical steps

These next few steps only have to be performed once. Non-beginners will find that these steps are not particularly difficult. If you're a beginner and you're reluctant to deal with more complication than necessary, you don't really have to learn how to do these next few steps; you may prefer to ask a more knowledgeable person (e.g., the webmaster) to perform these steps for you. However, these steps have to be performed by someone who is logged into your account. (And you should not send your password through email!) So you may actually have to be in the same room with that person who is assisting you. Once that person is logged in, you can skip the next few paragraphs of this document, and skip down to the section called "Personalizing the template."

Ignore the directory named "public_html" -- it's just for advanced users -- we will not be altering or using it. Instead we'll be creating and using a directory named "WWW".

Use the command "cd" to make sure that you're in your home directory. Then use the command "mkdir WWW" to create the WWW subdirectory. Note that that's "WWW" all in uppercase.

All of our department's WWW directories are "public", and are accessible to the outside world. Exceptions: If you've been concerned about privacy and have altered the defaults, then you'll need to change it back. Type these lines, in this order (ending each line with the "enter" or "return" key):

(what to type)	(what it means)
`cd`	takes you to your home directory
`cd ..`	takes you to its parent directory
`chmod 711 [username]`	(with "[username]" replaced by your username) resets permissions to normal
`cd`	takes you back to your home directory again
`chmod go+r WWW`	gives the world permission to read your WWW pages
`cd WWW`	go to the WWW directory to do the rest of your editing

Next, we want to create a file called "index.html" in the WWW directory. There are two ways we can proceed.

(1) A non-beginner may feel most comfortable with creating a web page on his/her home computer, using some web-page-editor (such as Netscape Gold), and then uploading that page into the WWW directory. To upload files, see instructions in our web page on file manipulation. You may find it especially helpful to look at the section of that page which discusses using Netscape to upload or download files.

(2) On the other hand, a beginner probably should just start with a copy of the department's "template" file, and then edit it to suit his/her needs. Here are detailed instructions for doing that:

The easiest way to download the template is using a web browser (Netscape, Lynx, or whatever). You may want to print out the next few instructions, so you'll have them handy when this screen is not displayed. You need to be running the browser from inside your user account on one of our departmental computers -- not just running Netscape from some other access provider such as VU-Net. You can run Netscape on one of the X-terminals in room 1427; or you can use telnet to log into your account from anywhere (e.g., from at home) and then run the Lynx browser.

Before you start your browser, give Atlas the command "cd WWW" to put you in the WWW directory. Then start up your browser and get it to this page that you're now reading. Then go to this link: generic home page template.

You want to save a copy of the source code for that file. How you do that depends on which browser you're using.

If you're using is Lynx, press "\" and you'll see the source file. Then press "p" for "printing" options. Choose "save to a local file."
If you're using Netscape, look at the menu at the top of the screen. Click "file," then "save as...". Then click on "HTML" as the "form of saved document". (Make sure the little box that says "save as..." is wide enough, or you won't see the option that says "HTML".) Make sure that the directory that you're saving into is your WWW directory.

With either browser, make sure that you save the file with the filename "index.html", in your "WWW" directory.

Personalizing the Template

If you've downloaded a copy of the template file, you now have to personalize it. Use whatever is your favorite texteditor -- e.g., Emacs or VI -- to edit the "index.html" file.

Throughout the file, change NAME to your name. (Don't overlook the very top line, between the "title" tags; you want to replace the word NAME there too.)

Replace RANK with your rank (student, lecturer, Assistant Professor, or whatever). Modify the personal information such as office and phone numbers. Replace the list of selected publications with your own list, or delete it altogether if you wish.

Testing and publicizing your URL

Assuming you've completed the steps outlined above ...

Welcome to the World Wide Web -- you now have a home page! It's not really fancy yet, but it now has all the basics. Your URL is

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~yourusername/

You can put your URL on your business card or your personal letterhead stationary, right next to your phone number and your email address. Anyone who knows how to feed an URL to his/her browser can now see your home page. (If you wish, you can send an e-mail message to some of your colleagues, saying "Come visit my home page! Here is the URL ..." and they can go there directly, without going through the department's home page.)

You can try this yourself, to test it. In fact, you should try this right away, to see if the page looks right. The easiest way to do that is (on a Macintosh, a Windows computer, or an X-terminal) to run a telnet session on one part of the monitor screen while running Netscape on another part of the screen. Use a text-editor in the telnet session, to adjust your index.html file. After each adjustment, tell the text-editor to "save" the file (but don't exit from the program). Wait a moment for all the computers involved to catch up. Then click the "reload" button on Netscape, to see what your file looks like after the adjustment.

When your home page looks as it should, you should send a message to me, webmaster@math.vanderbilt.edu, telling me that you're ready for me to publicize it. I'll point a link to it from our department's list. That will make it easy for other people to find your home page if they just know that you're in our department. Admittedly, this is not much publicity; it is analogous to getting your telephone number added to the telephone directory. (But if you add substantially more more content to your web page(s), you can publicize your web page further, by sending descriptions to the managers of the major search engines. See the section on "publicity" in our web page about creating web pages.)

Additional features and style tips

It's easy to learn how to use HTML, by looking at the source code for any of the pages that are already on the web -- including this one. If you're using Netscape, look at the menu at the top of the screen; click on "View" and then under that click on "Document Source." If you're using Lynx, press the "\" key to view the source file; press the "\" key again to return to the rendered view. If you want to see how someone creates some effect in his or her web page, just compare the rendered web page with the source file. Also, our collection of links about how to create web pages includes many elementary tutorials.
You can add more web pages, with links connecting your pages. Your home page should include a link back to the Math Department's home page; any of your subpages should include links back to your own home page. (That's because someone may bookmark your page and then lose track of where they got the bookmark; they may wish to be able to "find their way back.") Examples: At the bottom of this page is a link to the home page for our department; at the top of this page is a link to the index for this collection of documentation pages about our department's computer system.
You can post files of all kinds on the web, and you can embed pictures in your ordinary (html) web pages. We have extensive instructions on how to post mathematical documents on the web.
Test your web page with several different browsers, to get an idea of what other people will see. Try it with Netscape, both with images turned on and with images turned off. Also try it with Lynx, which has no images at all -- keep in mind that some people on the web still have old equipment that is not powerful enough to run Netscape. ... Also keep in mind that the Windows screen is wider, while the Macintosh screen is taller, so what people see will depend on what kind of computer they're using too. Try to design your web page so that it looks good, or at least readable, for all viewers. ... "Estimates put the average lifetime for a URL at 44 days" (Scientific American volume 276 number 3, March 1997, page 83). If some of your links point to other people's web pages, be sure to check the links periodically.
For security reasons, server-side includes are not enabled on our web server. Consequently, most cgi programs won't run.
Here are some very brief style tips.
If you want more fancy features, check our big collection of links to web pages about how to make web pages.

(A few words about filenames)

Your email address, your URL (i.e., the address of your web page) and your filename are three very different things, and it's good to avoid confusing them. Here are some examples. Let's suppose your name is either Jack Smith or Jacqueline Smith, and your userid jsmith. Then:

When you log into Atlas, and you're prompted for your username, you'll type jsmith and your password; that will put you in the home directory of the jsmith account. If you then type cd WWW, you'll find yourself in the WWW subdirectory of the jsmith account.

Your email address is jsmith@math.vanderbilt.edu

The URL of your homepage is

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/index.html

-- either of those should work in a web browser. But if you view the document as an file rather than as a viewable web page, its pathname is (under the jsmith directory)

WWW/index.html

You might create a secondary web page -- for instance, a page about your Math 172A class. You might put it in your WWW directory, and call it Math172A.html. Then it would have URL

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/Math172A.html

but if you view it as a file rather than a web page, its pathname is (under the jsmith directory)

WWW/Math172A.html

Note that these are different. In the pathname, there is a "WWW" immediately above the "Math172A.html"; in the URL there is not.

You might create a subdirectory under your WWW directory --- for instance, you might create a directory in which to post many of your publications. You might call this subdirectory "papers" or something like that. It could contain its own main page, perhaps listing the papers; a good name for that page is "index.html" again. It would have URL

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/papers/

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/papers/index.html

-- again, either of those should work. This file's pathname would be (under the jsmith directory)

WWW/papers/index.html

Your "papers" directory presumably would also contain several other files -- for instance, a file called "groupthy.tex" which contains your introduction to group theory. This file has URL

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~jsmith/papers/groupthy.tex

and you can use that URL to link to this file from any other web page in the world. But if you're linking to it from another web page in the same directory -- e.g., from the papers/index.html page -- then you can just use "groupthy.tex" as the URL. Of course, the filename is (under the jsmith directory)

WWW/papers/groupthy.tex

Note that there is a "WWW" immediately above "papers" in the filename but not in the URL.

A VU Math web page, updated 28 Feb 2005 by webmaster.

Setting up a Personal Home Page for Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students in the VU Math Department