There are two main options for creating a personal homepage on the Physics & Astronomy systems. The unix style public_html directory, or your own set of pages in this wiki.

A Wiki is a web based content management system where simple text-base syntax is used to form titles, links, formatting, etc. Wiki markup is easier to learn and manage than HTML. You edit your page(s) right in your web browser.

The people is an area for physics computing users where you can create your personal wiki page(s).

public_html is a special directory you create in your physics & astronomy home directory. Then you write regular HTML files and place them inside. This is the most basic and traditional way to create a website. We also support php and cgi so you can create interactive web applications and forms.

You need to store your web pages in a directory named public_html in your Physics home directory.

• Log into your physics.umn.edu account using ssh, and create the public_html directory to store your files:

    mkdir -m 711 public_html

This will create the directory with the correct permissions. If you created the directory without the correct permissions, you can set them using the command:

    chmod a+x public_html

• Your home directory itself also needs correct permissions in order for the web server to access the files. Usually this will already be correct, but you can set it using this command:

    chmod a+x ~

• Now create or place your web files within your public_html directory. Start with a file named index.html. This will be your home page, which people can access via the URL:

    http://webusers.physics.umn.edu/~your_username_here

Remember that all files you want to be accessible via the web must also be readable by all users. You can set the permission using the chmod command:

    chmod a+r filename 

We can set up special areas for research groups or other projects such as conferences, either on our regular web server or within the Physics intranet wiki site.

Permissions for such areas are set up via group membership. Make sure all directories and files in the area are group-writable, so that anyone in the correct group is able to edit them. In addition, you'll need to make sure files are world-readable, so that they can be accessed and displayed by the web server.

chgrp yourgroup filename     # Set the file to the group
chmod g+w filename           # Make it group writable
chmod a+rX filename          # make it readable (and eXecutable if necessary) to all