If you have a Unix account on the CS Unix machines, you may create a personal web page (often called a “home page”) to share information about yourself with others on the web. Please be sure to consult DU’s Intellectual Property and Network Acceptable Use policies, which pertain to the content and use of your home page. On your home page, you can’t do things like offer copyrighted mp3 files, sexually explicit content, or bad language.

The web address for your home page is:
http://www.cs.du.edu/~username
where username is your CS Unix user name.

Your CS home page should not be confused with your du.edu home page (http://www.du.edu/~username) – these are two separate home pages. You may want to create a page on one of your home pages pointing to the other home page, so that you only have to maintain one set of files.

Using your Home Page for the First Time

The public_html directory is created when your CS account is initiated. That is where all your web content will go. In order for the web server to access the directory and its pages, the following permissions are automatically set.

deb:~/public_html> ls -la
drwx—r-x        5     aroudik   faculty   4096     Feb 5 11:19 .
drwxrwxr-x     125 aroudik   faculty   12288    Apr 2 17:15 ..
-rw-r–r–         1      aroudik   faculty    65          Feb  5 11:20      index.html

If you don’t see a directory or the permissions are not right, you can set permissions using the chmod(1) command. You can run the following commands to allow access to your public_html directory:

Command What it Does
cd Changes to your home directory
mkdir public_html Creates a public_html directory, where you will store the content for your home page
chmod o+x . Sets permissions on your home directory so that the web server may enter it
chmod o+rx public_html Set permissions on your public_html directory so the web server may change to, and look at the contents of the directory.

Creating Web Content

Web pages are typically written in a language called HTML (hypertext markup language). For information about writing your own HTML use google to search for HTML tutorials. There are also numerous editors that would let you create a decent website even without any HTML knowledge. There are some free web editors: OpenBEXI, BlueGriffon, Brackets, CoffeeCup, BlueFish, Firebug, etc. You can also write HTML using an editor like emacs, pico, or nedit, and save files directly to your public_html directory.

Uploading Content

If you are creating your home page on another computer using something like Front Page, Dream Weaver, or Hot Dog, you will need to upload your web content to one of the CS Unix machines. You can use SFTP or FTP to upload content to the public_html directory inside of your home directory (for example, /u/home/username/public_html where username is your actual CS Unix user name). Remember that if you use SFTP to upload web content, you will need to use the chmod command to set permissions on any new files or directories. There are several free open source FTP clients like FileZilla and FreeFTP available for download.

Use the following information to connect to the server:

Host:  linux[1-4].cs.du.edu

Username: your CS Unix account username

Password: your CS Unix account password

Port: 22

CGI Scripts

Any file in your public_html directory with a .cgi extension will be executed as a CGI script. You can write CGI scripts in any programming or scripting languages that exist on the web server, such as PERL, c, or c++, etc.