Introduction

The department offers faculty and students the possibility of creating their own web page on "math" and "mathpost" server respectively. Below is a basic introduction to get you started on creating an homepage on these servers. Using HTML (the "hypertext markup language") to create web pages is beyond the scope of this document, but many good sources of information are available on the web.

The description below assumes the unix server to be "math", students may use the same information for "mathpost" substituting "math" for "mathpost".

What you need to make an homepage ?

The very first thing to note is that, when someone tries to view your Home page by using the following URL :
http://math.la.asu.edu/~your_login_name then the Browser tries to load a file called 'index.html'  in your public_html directory at your Math Server Account home directory. So while designing and creating HTML pages (using say Open Office) create it in a hierarchial fashion such that from the first page of your homesite (Has to be named index.html') all other pages can be accessed.

When you have placed your main web page (usually called "index.html") in your "public_html" directory, make sure that:

your "index.html" file is at least world-readable;

your "public_html" directory is at least world-"executable" (it does NOT need to be world-readable); and

your home directory is also at least world-executable (it also does NOT need to be world-readable)

Usually the access permissions on the files and directories will be set correctly. In order to limit access to your files by others you may need to use unix commands like "chmod" to change the default permissions on your files.
If you don't understand Unix permissions, check the man (stands for manual which is unix help) pages on "ls" and "chmod", or one of the good introductory books on Unix, or ask the system administrators.

To create a new webpage....

If you use Open Office this is how you create a new Page:

From the regular program menu, open Open Office. (as shown in the image figure 1), Go to the FILE Menu, Select 'NEW' and Select HTML DOCUMENT (you could also choose "AutoPilot" and then "WebPage" figure 2).

This brings up the Open Office (as shown in the image and 2). Type in your material, format it , insert links and beautify it using images, lines etc. Save the file on your local Machine. To preview the page on your local machine, open a web browser (Opera or Netscape are good), browse to the file using File then Open that would utlimately, look on the browser window.

To save the webpage:

• Title of the Page's This will be displayed at the top of the Browser windo

How to publish your webpage....

• File name: Give any name (unless if it is the first page !), remember it since you would need to link it later to your first page (or a previously linked page!)
• To publish the webpage, open a ssh client. On a windows machine, open SSH and login to math.(figure 3)
• On linux, publishing Location would be 'sftp <-oport=port number> @math.asu.edu '
• User name : which is your login ID.
• Password : You need this. Note: Please don't use the 'save password' option if you are on a PC this would compromise the security of your Math Account.
• Once you have uploaded the webpage, disconnect on windows or quit on linux

To update an existing web page....

If you are just updating an already existing page, then:
    Open the in Open Office. Go to FILE Menu and select  'Open Page'. This will bring up the Open Office HTMl editor. Edit the page as you want. Save the changes and Preview/Browse it. If everything seems OK, then publish it (as described above).

To Test your home page
 

You can now test your home page. In a web browser, open the URL

"http://math.la.asu.edu/~login_name/"

Example:

Click here for an example.
You can also download this example and modify it as you like by clicking on download and unzipping it.

Download