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  Home > Web > Creating Your Homepage

Creating Your Homepage

You will need to be familiar with basic UNIX commands in order to understand the following instructions. If not, take a look at the manual pages for the following commands: ls, mkdir, chmod. Use the "man" command to read a man page. The first step is to check the permissions on your home directory and create a .www directory within it. Read the .www tutorial to do this.

Create your home page. This is a text file called index.html within your .www directory. If you want to edit the html directly, you can use a text editor such as xemacs, emacs, pico or vi:

% cd ~/.www 
% xemacs index.html 

This will call up the xemacs text editor. Please note, you can use any text editor to create and edit the index file, e.g. emacs, pico, vi, etc. Cut and paste the following into xemacs:

<!DOCTYPE html 
     PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> 

  <head>
    <title>Hello world</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p>
      This is my homepage.
    </p> 
    <p>
    	The views and opinions expressed in this page
    	are strictly those of the page author. The 
    	contents of this page have not been reviewed 
    	or approved by the University of Minnesota.
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

Check permissions on all your .www directory files. Anything you want readable on the Web needs to be 644 (world readable). For example, after you create your index.html file above, do:

% chmod 644 index.html 

Test your homepage

With your favorite browser, open

http://www-users.itlabs.umn.edu/~<username>/

If you get an Internal Server Error, double-check that you followed all the steps above. If you still can't get it to work, contact Systems Staff.

Related Links

University of Minnesota Policies

The policies enforced by the U of M must be followed while creating web pages within the University's domain.

Helpful HTML links

The following list contains helpful resources for creating HTML web sites.

 
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