Personal Webpages

All students and staff members can create their personal website in their home directory, which can be publicly visible.

public_html folder

Any user that wants to quickly create a publicly available personal web page, they can do so by creating a public_html or a local_html folder in their home directory.

Users MUST set the right permissions for their public_html folder in Linux, in order to get displayed on the browser.

The folders must be ‘executable’ by the ‘other’ and the files inside the public_html folder must be at least ‘readable’ by the ‘other’
The persmissions should be as bellow:

 

Folder name Permissions (rwx)
home dir (e.g. /homes/jdoe123)  o+x  (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/public_html  o+x (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/local_html  o+x (e.g. drwx-----x)
/homes/jdoe123/public_html/index.html  o+r (e.g. drwx-----r)

It should look like this:

Path: ~/public_html

jdoe123@frank ~ $ ls -lha ~/public_html/
total 28K
drwx---r-x.   3 jdoe123 staffphdguest 4.0K Apr  8 11:07 .
drwx--x--x. 154 jdoe123 staffphdguest  12K Apr 30 15:03 ..
-rw-r--r--.   1 jdoe123 staffphdguest   23 Mar  7  2017 .htaccess
-rw-r--r--.   1   jdoe123 staffphdguest  929 Jan 12  2018 index.html

Path: H:\public_html

Path: smb://frank.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/USERNAME

 

URL

The URL to access someone’s personal website, is the URL for the EECS website, folloed by the ~ symbol and the user’s EECS username, for example:

  • http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~jdoe123/
  • http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/localuser/~jdoe123/

 

 

The server has been set up so that it will fail to serve any files pointed to by, for example, symbolic links that point out of the public or local directories. When you want to link to other documents, your personal pages should contain complete URLs for them.

So as an example if a request is made for:

"http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~leonardo/bike_stuff/bikes.html"

(this does not exist!) then it would serve the document ~leonardo/public_html/bike_stuff/bikes.html. If the URL was http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~leonardo/bike_stuff then if the file index.html exists in the directory then this is served. As a department, we have standardised on using index.html.

Uploading to your personal pages

You can access your home directory remotely. scp is often a convenient way to update your personal web pages (copy the files to your public_html directory in the obvious way). See the remote access web pagesfor more information.

Letting People Know About Your Personal Page

At present the URL http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/people gives a list of the staff and PhDs in the department. This is generated from a user database – if you’ve entered a home page URL via the Intranet web details editor it will be shown there.