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Weaving Your Own Web in the Math Department

The following are complete instructions and illustrations on what you need to do to be able to start putting your own documents on the web.

  1. The first thing you need to do is send e-mail to help@math.bu.edu and ask the people who respond to this mail to create a directory for you where you can store your web files. Help will reply to you when they have set this up. Once they have replied to your request, you can move on to the following steps.

  2. The directory that has been created for you will be located in: /other/www/ INDIVIDUAL/. In this directory, you will notice a subdirectory that resembles your login name. This subdirectory is where you will store all of your web files. It will be your Web directory. You need to use the cd command to get to this directory. If I wanted to get to my web directory, this is what I would type:
    math larock % cd /other/www/INDIVIDUAL/larock

  3. In your Web directory, there should already be a default file which gets loaded when someone wants to look at your Web page. This default file is called index.html. This is the file that you will need to modify to change the appearance of your home page. It is also the file which uses the HTML syntax. It may look similar to the example in the previous section.You can use the emacs or vi editors to change your Web pages.
  4. Once you are familiar with the HTML syntax you may want to create more files in your web directory. However, in order for people all over the world to be able to read your Web files, you must give them permission to do so. You can accomplish this by using the chmod command. For example, I would need to use the cd command to get to my web directory, and then use the chmod command to change the file permissions on the document called web-document.html.
    math larock % cd /other/www/INDIVIDUAL/larock
    math larock % chmod a+r web-document.html

    This chmod command says to give everyone in the world read access to the file called web-document.html.
  5. If you have Web documents that are in your home directory and you want to put them in your Web directory, you will need to copy them to there. You can do this with the cp command. If my web-document.html file was in my home directory and I wanted to copy it to my Web directory, here is what I would type to get it there:
    math larock % cp web-document.html /other/www/INDIVIDUAL/larock/web-document.html
  6. Now you are ready to test to see that you can really read your documents from the web. If you are using one of the math machines using the UNIX operating system, type the following:
    math larock % netscape &
    Once Netscape is running, you will need to get to the Individuals page, which is currently http://math.bu.edu/INDIVIDUAL. Then find your home page and see what happens!



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September 2004
Mathematics and Statistics
Boston University