Home directories
When you login to chow via telnet or ftp, you will be placed in a directory (directories are UNIX equivalents to Windows and Macintosh “folders”) called your home directory. This location is referred to by the name ~userid, where userid is your account user name.

Location of web page files
You should store files relating to your web page in a directory called public_html inside of your home directory. If you don’t already have a public_html directory, use the command:

mkdir ~/public_html

Creating the web page
You can use current versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer to create web pages. If you do that work on a personal computer, you can also use those programs to transfer the new files to your web server area. There are many other programs that do the same thing (such as Adobe Pagemill and Microsoft FrontPage). You can also use programs like Word to create html files that you can upload to your web site using FTP.

The first page you should create
If you put files into the directory (“folder”) /home/userid/public_html, then they will be visible to people using the web address http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid
The convention is to name the first file /home/userid/public_html/index.html so people can use the shorter address http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid. Otherwise they’ll have to use http://www.math.jhu.edu/~userid/something.html to specify a page, which is a bother.

Setting the permissions
In order for a file to be readable by the outside world, not only must the file permissions include world readability, but also the world must have access through the entire directory structure above the file. The following shows how to properly set the file permissions so users can see your web pages.

To set the permissions on public_html:

chmod 711 ~/public_html

to set permissions on files in public_html:

chmod 644 ~/public_html/[put the file name here]

to set permissions on subdirectories of public_html:

chmod 711 ~/public_html/[put the subdirectory name here]

The above commands are written so that they can be used when in any directory. If you are in the directory where the file resides, you can use the shorter command: chmod 644[put the file name here]

Finally, after your webpage has been set up, send an email to jkong@math.jhu.edu to have it linked to the People page.