Personal homepages
The mkhome command, available on the user service machines, gives you a simple way of creating a personal homepage on the web. You can run mkhome using secure command line access (SSH).
Running mkhome the first time
Log on to one of the user services machines using your BUCS username and password.
Run mkhome by typing:
mkhome
mkhome starts by introducing itself, and then asking you several questions about yourself. It uses the answers to create a fairly simple homepage.
The file will be called index.html. On most campus PCs running MS Windows operating systems, this file will be available as: h:\public_html\index.html
Once created, your homepage will be available on the Web using the URI:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/user/ for students and staff
where user is your username. The page will automatically be added to the list of all personal pages at Bath but this does not happen until the next day.
Running mkhome again
You can re-create your homepage at any time by re-running mkhome. You will have to answer all the questions again. If you already have a personal homepage, mkhome will confirm that you want to overwrite it before it does so.
Accessing your homepage
On most campus PCs, your home page can be can be accessed from your desktop via Windows Explorer or My Computer (click on H drive and look under public_html for index.html). Your personal filestore can be mapped on to a PC as a network drive (normally mounted as Drive H).
To do this in Windows:
- Open Windows Explorer or My Computer (Make sure the tool bar is visible - if not select View-Toolbars).
- If drive H is already mounted, right click on the H: drive and disconnect it.
- Click Map Network Drive Choose H: and enter \\samba\homes (or \\rumba\homes if you are on Active Directory)
Once you have mapped drive H, click My Computer or Windows Explorer icon, open drive H, then the public_html folder where you will find index.html. Edit this file in the normal way but always make sure to save the file with the same name and under the public_html folder - this is particularly important if you are using the editor available with Internet Explorer as it will try to save to a different location and filename.
The mkhome script is checked to the HTML 4.0 standard, has a style sheet attached and contains highly commented source code. The style sheet defines the appearance of the page by setting eg font type and colour.
Once you have created your personal home page, it will be added automatically to the list of all personal home pages at Bath and will be available on the Web via the URL: http://people.bath.ac.uk/username/ (where username is your UNIX username). It will also be found by the software that allows Web users to search for information about people at Bath. Please be aware that this facility is provided as a personal privilege and should not be abused. Also remember that the Web is not static. You should, therefore, regularly check your pages to ensure that the information in them is up to date and that existing links are still valid. Personal home pages remain on the system only while the provider is a registered user.
Note that, if you have mapped your H drive other than via rumba, you must change the permissions to make sure that the directories containing your web files have 'execute' permission on them, otherwise the web server will not be able to read your home page.
Editing your homepage
Editing by hand on your PC
If you intend to maintain your homepage using a PC-based editor, you will have answered pc to the first question asked by mkhome. You can then use the editor of your choice, for example edit or notepad, to create HTML files in your h:\public_html directory.
Editing by hand on a BUCS UNIX machine
If you intend to maintain your homepage using a UNIX editor you will have answered unix to the first question asked by mkhome. You can then use the editor of your choice on the user service machines, for example pico, vi or emacs, to update your homepage and create other HTML files. If you want to create a file in your public_html directory called page.html, type:
cd public_html
pico page.html
This file would then be available on the Web as:
http://people.bath.ac.uk/username/page.html
You can learn from existing pages. To display the HTML code in a document:
in IE use Page - View Source (or from the File menu, View - Source)
in Firefox, View - Page Source.
Using dedicated HTML editors
HTML editors exist for UNIX, MS-Windows and the MAC. These are often referred to as stand-alone editors; these include HTML Assistant (PC), HoTMetaL (UNIX & PC), tkHTML (UNIX) and HTMLPro (Macintosh). The great advantage these have over normal text editors is that only a limited knowledge of HTML is necessary to use them successfully. For PC users the recommended editor is Macromedia's Dreamweaver.
