Any Canisius College student can create a web home page or set of pages. There are two places to post them:

• Your Novell H: drive
• nikto -- the UNIX server operated by the CS Department

The Novell option is fairly easy. When you log on to the campus system, you log in to the Novell Netware software, either in Windows or MacOS. In Windows, if you click on "My Computer" you will see an H: drive that contains your private files. Inside that drive, make a folder called public_html. And in there, make a file called index.html that contains your home page. You make upload any files you want into that folder and link off your home page to them.

Computer Science majors are encouraged to post their pages on nikto where they have a great deal of disk space they can use. This document explains the basics of how to do this.

If you want to add images to your pages, you can scan in photographs that you have taken or drawings you have made. There are scanners in the public PC labs, including the library lab. Also, Dr. Meyer has a digital camera and will take your picture for you and upload it so you can incorporate it into your web site. Just pop in and see him if you would like this.

How to make your page

First, if you are unfamiliar with HTML, you can browse one of the many tutorials available on the Web. Here are a few:

http://w3schools.com/xhtml/default.asp

http://www.htmlgoodies.com

The rest of this document applies to nikto.

First, make a new directory in your login directory, called public_html. (That is an underscore, not a dash or minus). Then make it public:

     % mkdir public_html
     % chmod 0755 public_html

Next, go into that directory and create a file called index.html. Please note the lower-case letters.

     % cd public_html
     % pico index.html

This HTML document will be the first document accessed when someone visits your Web page, and the department will make a link to it from the majors (or minors) page.

You can tell others that your URL is

     http://nikto.canisius.edu/~yourname

where "yourname" is your username, the one you log in with.

Make sure that your pages are public readable! Otherwise visitors will be rebuffed with that rude error message "404 Not found." Here's a UNIX command that makes all your HTML files public.

     % chmod 0644 *.html

Suppose you don't know much about HTML or about making up your own copy of index.html. What should you do? The easiest thing is to just look at what others have done.

To get you started, you may copy the student copy of index.html. This is a purely generic one. To copy this, start up a web browser and click on View/Page Source and save it to your personal computer. Then you can edit it.

To upload files, it is perhaps simplest to start up Internet Explorer and change the URL to

     ftp://nikto.canisius.edu

Most advanced websites incorporate JavaScript, which is a programming language that allows you to create programs which will customize your web pages. You can find tutorials and free JavaScript programs to use at http://www.javascript.com.

If you have any problems, please contact Dr. Mark Meyer at 888-2432 or send him email at meyer@canisius.edu.

Have fun!