Any student or member of staff may have their own personal collection of documents published to the outside world or just within the department.
The method of access to these documents is to use the URLs:
- http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/~user/ or
- http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/localuser/~user/
where user is someone’s login name. The servers will then look in ~user/public_html/ and ~user/local_html/ for the appropriate documents. If you want to look at someone else’s pages but don’t know their login, try using http://intranet.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/people and following the instructions.
These directories are available as H:\public_html (etc) under Windows, or within the volume mounted as smb://frank.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/user under MacOS X
To make your own page, make yourself “local_html” and “public_html” directories, then create a file called index.html in your local_html directory and experiment. When you know what you’re doing, make a similar file in your public_html directory. You could make it a link to the local one, provided it doesn’t have any local URLs on it. Have a look at other people’s pages, and copy one you like the look of. Make sure that your home directory, local_html and public_html directories have ‘other execute’ (o+x) permission, and that your index.html files have ‘other read’ (o+r) permission. This must be done on a Unix/Linux system (desktop or frank, bert, etc). Read up on the chmod command (“man chmod”) if you’re not a Unix person. The folders and files can be edited from MacOS/Windows machines, but the permissions should always be set from Unix.
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.dcs.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.