Home Directory Service: Web Publishing

[Nov 23, 2009 14:09] Web access to Microsoft Live@edu accounts now works.

You can easily publish and manage both personal and departmental Web spaces using the UVa Home Directory Service. Both require a UVa computing ID (e.g., mst3k) and a Home Directory Service account.

Table of Contents

Personal Web Pages

The Home Directory Service allows UVa faculty, staff and students to store personal Web pages in a publicly-accessible directory. You can publish Web pages without the need to use a UNIX account and you will have easy access to manage your personal Web space through the HDS.

The address for all Web pages created by individuals using the Home Directory Service (HDS) is http://www.people.virginia.edu/~YourID where YourID is your UVa Computing ID (e.g., mst3k).

If you have a new Home Directory Service account, there is a public_html directory (folder) on your Home Directory Service account that contains a file named home.html. The home.html file contains a template for a home page for the Web.

If you have previously created a Web page, connect to the Home Directory Service from your Windows or Macintosh system to edit the existing page or create new pages.

Jump to: Creating the Content for a Page | Uploading the Page | Viewing the Web Page

Departmental Web Pages

You first need to understand something about the directory structure for the blue.unix cluster which hosts departmental websites. All websites on blue.unix are in the /web/ folder. To upload your site content, you need to connect to blue.unix using your computing ID and your blue.unix password. The directory where your content is uploaded is /web/[DOMAIN_URL_HERE]/doc/, where [DOMAIN_URL_HERE] is the domain to which you are publishing (e.g., faculty.virginia.edu).

For example, if you are trying to publish something to faculty.virginia.edu, you would have to connect to /web/faculty.virginia.edu/doc/ and put your content into the appropriate project directory (e.g., econ410) so the full path would be /web/faculty.virginia.edu/doc/econ410/. If you have questions about which directory you should use or how to name a departmental directory, please contact a departmental administrator, your Local Support Partner, or the UVa webmaster.

Creating the Content for a Page

Once you have logged into the Home Directory Service, use an editor or software (like Dreamweaver) to personalize the home.html (or departmental) file. Save the file when you are done. The UVa Web Development Support and ITC Web Publishing Support sites both have more information on how to create and structure your pages.

There are also Dreamweaver training classes; in the Dreamweaver Fundamentals workshop you can learn how to create and edit websites visually, set up a website, import and format text and images, use cascading style sheets (CSS), create hyperlinks and navigation bars, create and format tables, and publish your Web pages to a server.

After creating your file, you must upload it to the server.

Uploading the Page

Once you have created the Web page, you have to save it to your public (or departmental) Web directory. As an example, the public_html folder is used for storing the contents of a personal website. Anything you save to that folder will be accessible to anybody that can get to your website.

  1. Connect to the Home Directory Service using the Home Directory Login Utility. (See the page about Home Directory Service Connection Utilities for help with connecting).
  2. Open the public_html or departmental folder under your Home Directory.
  3. Open the folder where you have your Web page(s) saved that you wish to publish.
  4. Copy and paste the files you want to publish into the public_html or departmental folder.

You can also upload your file:

Viewing the Web Page

You can view your published personal Web page at http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mst3k/pagename.html where mst3k is your UVa computing ID and pagename.html is the name of the file you are trying to access.

Departmental pages would be reached via an address like http://faculty.virginia.edu/Biol149/ or http://faculty.virginia.edu/citiesandcultures/.

Setting File Permissions

You can allow others to access your files and directories. If you can use UNIX commands to change file permissions, you probably will not want to use the online permission-setting Web page for HDS.

If you do not use UNIX to set permissions:

Note that since files and directories have different types of permissions, they are listed separately on the results page. In order for others to access one of your files, they need to be able to Access the directory and the file needs to be set to Public Read. For more information on how you might want to set file permissions, read a Short Guide to Home Directory File Permissions.

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