Setting up your personal web site on pangea

Last revision June 7, 2006

Any person with an account on Pangea can make his/her personal Web documents available through this server by following the steps outlined below. Group pages should be served from a group directory, not a personal home directory. Contact the Web Manager to make a group directory. To find out more about creating Web documents and how the pangea Web server is configured, check the Basics of World Wide Web publishing on pangea web page.

Disk space on pangea is limited, so this personal web hosting is appropriate for moderate amounts of material related to your research and learning and only small amounts of personal materials. If you have large amounts of personal materials to share, you should use one of the many inexpensive commercial providers, such as 1&1 Internet or DreamHost.

Make sure the WWW subdirectory in your pangea home directory is made correctly.

This directory is automatically created for all new pangea accounts. You do not need to do anything, unless you have accidentally deleted this subdirectory or changed its permissions or those of the parent directory. In that case, follow these directions to recreate it correctly.

Create and load your home page and other pages.

• Use your favorite editor to create your Web documents in your WWW directory. You can write simple documents directly in the HTML language using an editor on pangea. If you are unfamiliar with HTML, take a look at the Basics of World Wide Web publishing on pangea or the NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML.

  You can prepare documents on a Mac or PC using any number of web-authoring programs (including the Composer included with Netscape) and then load them on pangea with a sftp file transfer program or via desktop file mounting for Windows or Macintosh computers.

• You may place many documents within your WWW directory, or you can make subdirectories for them. All your web pages, graphics, etc., must be in your own WWW directory or its subdirectories, although your pages can contain standard URL links to other people's pages or other servers.
• Normal file and directory permissions on pangea allow the web server to see and serve these files you create. If you are using unusual permission settings in your home directory, you must enable "other" read permission (and search permission as well for directories) in order for your files to be visible on the web.
• For security reasons, you cannot include executable scripts or programs in your own WWW directory. Contact the Web Manager if you want to create or import a CGI script. He must put it into a special system directory, after checking it for possible security problems.

Take a look at your web pages.

• The URL (web address) for the web documents in your WWW directory is:

  http://pangea.stanford.edu/~username/document.html

  You must substitute your own account name in place of username (but leave the tilde character ~ before your account name), and substitute the name of your HTML file in place of document.html.

• The document name index.html or index.shtml is special. If a document with one of these names exists in your WWW directory, it will be displayed when you use the simpler URL:

  http://pangea.stanford.edu/~username/

  Thus, index.html is the best name for your "main" page, as it can be referenced simply by your account name.

• As part of the setup for new pangea accounts, an initial "generic" index.shtml page has already been created in your WWW directory. This generic page simply states that you have not created any web pages yet. You should remove this file when you start creating pages of your own.
• As a UNIX system, pangea is case-sensitive. This means that file names with upper-case (capital) letters are not the same as file names with lower-case letters. These three addresses point to different files:

  http://pangea.stanford.edu/~user/index.html
  http://pangea.stanford.edu/~user/INDEX.html
  http://pangea.stanford.edu/~user/index.HTML

  To avoid problems finding your files, use only lower-case letters in the file names and extensions.

If you have a general interest document that should be linked into the main Stanford Earth Sciences page or one of the department pages, send a message to the Web Manager which includes the URL of your document.

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