FAQs: Personal Web Pages

Access Your Home Directory
Prepare the Web Server
Create your Web Page(s)
Transfer your Pages
Test your Page

Can I Publish Personal Web Pages?

YES! You can publish personal web pages using your home.utah.edu account. There are some restrictions. First, you cannot use your home.utah.edu account for commercial purposes (like running a small e-business or consulting practice). Second, you cannot use your account for illegal purposes (like running a pornography site or hate site). Third, you need to use less than 10 Mb of disk space.

What can you publish? For starters, put your resume on-line. Let your future employer know you're internet savvy. Publish pictures of your pets or your last vacation with the gang. Have fun with it and learn more about the internet in the process.

One word of caution. The internet is wide open to both good and bad. Protect yourself by protecting your personal information. When you put your resume on line, consider carefully whether or not to include phone number or address information. In an electronic world, your Email address is probably sufficient.

Check out the How do I set up my webspace FAQ for information on how to set up a web site on home.utah.edu.

How do I Set Up my Webspace?

Here are the basic steps to publish your personal web pages on home.utah.edu server.

Access Your Home Directory

To work in the campus system, you should use FTP (File Transfer Protocol), SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol), or SSH (Secure Shell protocol) to connect to the web server home.utah.edu. These protocols are used to move content from a local computer to the remote server and vice versa. This method also allows you to maintain a backup copy of your site locally, for working up new versions and for archival purposes. Note: FTP works from campus computers, but not from off campus. The server home.utah.edu now requires a SFTP connection for any IP space that is not trusted.

Your website address will be http://home.utah.edu/~uNID.

Prepare the Web Server

The web server publishes your web pages on the Internet. You need to create a special directory in your home directory that the web server uses to publish your web pages. This directory should be named public_html. There are two ways to accomplish this one-time setup, including:
- With an FTP program
- With an SSH program

Create the Web Page(s)

There are several programs that can help you write web pages. Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive, Netscape Composer, and Microsoft FrontPage are some of the more common programs. They work like a word processor and allow you to format text on screen. However, when you save your page, it is saved as HTML (HyperText Markup Language) - the language of the web. If you're familiar with HTML, you can use any text editor or word processor to write your pages. Your home page needs to be called index.html for the server to recognize it as your home page. There are many tutorials available on the web for creating web pages. Check out this tutorial from Maricopa school district in Arizona.

HTML Editors

HTML editors come in two flavors: text editors and "What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG)" editors. Your choice of editor will be influenced by what you want to do. HTML editors range in price from free to several hundred dollars.

With WYSIWYG HTML editors, each editor has its own strengths and weaknesses.

Here are some thoughts on popular ones:

• Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.0 (30 days free trial) or campus members can purchase it at a very discounted price through the Office of Software Licensing: www.software.utah.edu.

Dreamweaver's seamless design allows you to easily insert multimedia content and create dramatic effects using dynamic HTML. It also takes some of the guesswork out of web page creation by telling you which effects work with Netscape Navigator and which work with Internet Explorer. This latest version of Dreamweaver adds many options for advanced users, such as integrating XML and building ColdFusion database structures.

• Netscape Composer (Netscape 8.x does NOT include Composer. Composer 7.x or 4.x are available for free download from the Netscape Archive page)

This is a good basic editor whose easy layout and clear button functions make it perfect for the raw beginner. It's not very useful for high-end editing, but those looking for simple pages with no frills should look no further.

Validation Services

Before publishing your work, we recommend you to validate your HTML files through a free service like the W3C Markup Validation Service. These services will tell you if your code conforms to the W3C Recommendations and other standards. If you are not sure your coding conforms to HTML specifications, this can be a useful teaching tool.

Transfer your Web Pages to the Web Server

If you author your web pages on a desktop computer, you need to transfer them to the web server. This can be done using an SSH or FTP program. Some web authoring programs support FTP and allow you to transfer the files from within the authoring program. Remember, you must use SFTP (secure FTP) when uploading to the home.utah.edu server from an off-campus connection. (Microsoft FrontPage has a nonstandard FTP client and cannot be used to transfer files to home.utah.edu.) If the program you use does not support file transfer, there are several public domain SSH and FTP clients available.

To access your home.utah.edu file space, you need to use your originally assigned Network ID. Prior to May 2002, University of Utah students, staff and faculty received a Network ID, known as a NID, in this format: jpd5. Since May 2002, new students, staff and faculty received a NID in this format: u0012345. The numbers are your student or employee ID, where the first zero has been replaced with the letter ‘u’. This new format is known as a uNID. Everyone has a new “uNID”. If you became a University of Utah campus member after May 2002, you do not have a Network ID in the old format.

Make sure you set world read permissions on any files you transfer to public_html.

Test your Page

Open the page http://home.utah.edu/~nid (where nid is your University Network ID) in your web browser. Does it open? If not, you might need to review how to set permissions in the program you're using and make sure that the index.html file has world read permissions set. Does it look the way you expect? If not, you might need to edit the HTML.

If you are interested in CGI scripting, please see our FAQ on CGI.

Creating and publishing a web page is a process and it may take a few tries to get everything just right. Have fun and experiment.

For More

Product and Service Information

Publishing Web Pages with FTP

Publishing Web Pages with SSH

Help Desk