Last update Oct 2005
| Dear users, this note is quite technical. If you are not familiar with the terms used, it's suggested that you contact your group's usual I.T Representative for advice. |
If you wish to create a home page, and optionally other web pages,
in the file hierarchy that's
accessible to the departmental cluster (i.e in your
"home-directory"), then
the procedure is to create a subdirectory called public_html
in your unix "home-directory".
Be sure to make this directory, and the files that are in it, readable
by "world" so that the web server can access them.
This subdirectory, public_html, and any directories that
you create below it, defines the area of the filesystem that you
wish to make available to the web server for exposure to the WWW.
The server will not allow any other of your files to be
viewed on the WWW - at least, not without your specific instructions.
At the very least, you should put into your public_html
subdirectory a file called index.html, which will be
the "default document" that visitors will see when they access
your "home page" directory without specifying an explicit document
name. You usually make use of the index.html file
to provide descriptions and links to the other documents that you
are offering. You can also put your personal information there if
you wish, or into a separate file with a link to it from the
index.html file.
The web script which looks up members of the Department in the phone/room list also performs checks to determine whether the member has an email address and/or web page on the Departmental system. Please keep in mind that this looks only at the departmental system, and knows nothing about your address or web pages elsewhere, e.g on group research systems or at other departments or institutes, unless you tell it. Please see below for details of directing readers to your home page on another server. Furthermore it has no way of ensuring that your web page contains anything useful or interesting: it will advertise your personal web page to the world even if it says nothing more than "under construction" or "does this work?". Please take responsibility for your personal web pages.
Although the department does not wish to exercise editorial control over the contents of user pages, users should keep in mind that their pages are subject to the general rules that the University make concerning WWW pages. Although our "WWW visitors" will be aware that they are viewing private WWW pages rather than official "outputs of the department", it's clear that the contents of the pages will tend to reflect on the reputation of the department, and the university as a whole.
Please do not include the university logotype except in contexts where it is appropriate, i.e pages that are created for official university purposes (again, please refer to the university regulations concerning WWW pages if in any doubt).
The server, www.physics.gla.ac.uk, has a "Staff lookup" feature; when a member of staff gets looked up using this feature, the server will check whether they have created personal web page(s), and, if so, will automatically create a www link to their home page. This, therefore, automatically makes your pages accessible without you needing to take any action. (Please verify that this mechanism is working for your own home page - contact the webmaster if there is any problem with it.)
Additionally, you are of course welcome to advertise your web pages in any way that seems useful. As far as the WWW is concerned, the document address (technically, "URL") of your home page is:
http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/~userid/
for each respective user identifier, userid.
Please note the use of the host alias name, www.physics.gla.ac.uk: at
any given time, this will be an alias for the actual host node where
the web server is running, but you should refer to it by this
well-known service name and not by its actual host node name.
When pages make references amongst themselves, the best procedure
is to use relative URL notations, so that there is no need to refer
explicitly to the host name.
You will see that the term public_html does not
appear in your WWW document address at all.
As far as the WWW server is concerned, this file subdirectory is the
"root" of the entire tree that you are making available to it;
if a caller attempts to move upwards in this tree they will
not be taken upwards into your own (private) home
directory, but will in fact find themselves in the document root
of the server itself (i.e the URL
http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/).
Some users keep their WWW pages elsewhere (e.g Astro, PPE, or even in another Department or at a remote site such as RAL or CERN), and in this case the www.physics.gla.ac.uk server will not be able to locate them automatically. In these cases, it's strongly recommended that you follow the procedure described below in order to ensure that your pages can be advertised via the Departmental Server, unless you choose to also create an actual webpage on the Departmental server.
If, for some reason, you don't want to present these web pages
as your personal home pages, we've now adopted a convention that
is modelled on what the astro group have been doing: if you create a file
called i_have_no_home_pages in your public_html
subdirectory, then the script will behave as if it had not found the
home pages area.
Understand that this has no effect on direct web access to that area
by someone who goes there explicitly - the only effect is to
cause the staff lookup script to ignore the
personal home page area's existence.
A procedure that is of assistance in such cases is to set up
a "redirection" from the www.physics.gla.ac.uk server to the
place where your own pages are kept.
This is done by creating a file with a special name,
.htaccess, in your public_html directory,
as follows. The .htaccess file can contain a large number of
different directives, which (on some other occasion) you might
wish to peruse in the server documentation:
only one particular directive is needed here.
Consider the hypothetical user "aperson" who keeps their personal page at the hypothetical web URL http://agroup.physics.gla.ac.uk/aperson/
Then the presently recommended recipe for placing into their public_html/.htaccess file on the Departmental web server would be this:
RedirectMatch 301 /~aperson.* http://agroup.physics.gla.ac.uk/aperson/
(301 is the status code for permanent redirection; the word "permanent" is accepted instead of "301", if you prefer).
There is then no need to provide any actual documents in the file system of the Departmental server - indeed, with this specific formula there is no point in providing any, since the redirection makes them unreachable, but obviously there are other options that would address that situation if you prefer.
(.htaccess
redirection would not be the appropriate procedure if you decided to
migrate a complete document tree from one server to another. In that
case, you should consult with the webmaster of the old server to get
a document tree redirection set up for you, so that each reference
to a document at its old location is sent to the same document at
its new location.)