Creating a personal web page

We allow our visiting researchers to set up their own personal web pages in order to publicize their research interests and make information available on the web. We ask guests not to abuse this privilege, and to review the IMA acceptable use policy in section 1.1 regarding appropriate and inappropriate use of our computer system.

All IMA home directories contain a public_html subdirectory, which will be where you place your web page. A web page is a text file which contains information and HTML commands to format this information and to provide hypertext links. Teaching you how to use HTML to create web pages is beyond the scope of this document, but many good sources of information are available on the web, and books may be available for checkout from the system administrators.

When you have placed your main web page (usually called index.html) in your public_html directory, make sure that:

• your index.html file is at least world-readable;
• your public_html directory is at least world-executable (it does not need to be world-readable); and
• your home directory is also at least world-executable (it also does not need to be world-readable).

If you don't understand Unix permissions, check the man pages on ls and chmod, or one of the good introductory books on Unix, or ask the system administrators. In the meantime, you can run the commands chmod 644 public_html/index.html, chmod 711 public_html, and chmod 711 /home/username from your home directory to make sure that you have at least these minimal permissions set.

You can now test your IMA home page. In a web browser, open the URL

http://www.ima.umn.edu/$\sim$username/

where username is your IMA login name. You should send e-mail to webmaster@ima.umn.edu when you're done so that we may add a link to your page from the IMA web site.