Web Publishing for Beginners

• Overview - The Basic Steps
• Prerequisites
• First Steps
• Second Steps
• Learn a Little HTML
• Learn About URLs
• Maintaining Your Web Pages (Including Moving them Back and Forth to Unix)
• Learning More

1. Obtain an account on a computer with a Web server. If you choose to use an ACCC machine, this means you should open an account on tigger (for faculty/staff personal Web pages and for departmental Web pages) or icarus (for students personal Web pages); both have Web HTTP servers. Tigger is www.uic.edu and icarus is www2.uic.edu. There are other machines on campus (for example in math or aces), but this tutorial presumes you are on tigger or icarus.
   
   
2. Set up a directory on the Web server machine to hold your Web pages.
   • For a personal Web site, you'll use the subdirectory called public_html in your home directory; you'll put your personal Web pages in it. All files in this directory count against your account's home directory disk quota. (We create a public_html directory for you when you open your account.)
     
     
   • Official departmental pages or class pages are usually put in disk space owned by the system; the disk space they take up do not count against anyone's personal home directory disk quota. But they ust be accessed from the personal account; no special departmental accounts are given or needed to publish Web pages. To obtain an allocation for an official page, fill out the form for:
     • Student organizations
     • Departments
     • Classes
   You will receive an email message saying where your organization, department, or class Web pages should go and what their URL will be.
   (Do you remember the URL but don't remember the directory that your files should go in? See Question 3.2 What's the real Unix directory of my department (or class or organization) Web page? in the Web Publishing FAQ.)
   
   
3. Create your HTML files. Details are given in the links below. You can create them on the Unix machines or create them on a personal computer and them transfer them to the Unix machine (Web server).
   
   
4. Make sure the file permissions on Unix are set correctly. If you're using a personal computer HTML editor, it should do this for you. Or wait until tomorrow and the ACCC's Web file permission utility will take care of it for you. Your files are now publicity available everywhere on the Internet.
   
   
5. Check out your pages. Use different browsers, such as:
   • Firefox and Internet Explorer from a personal computer
   • lynx from either icarus or tigger -- many people who are visually impaired use lynx with a text reader to surf the Web. If your page is a mess in lynx, they won't be able to make sense of it.
   • Netscape under X windows
   Different browsers tolerate bad HTML to differing degrees. They also look different -- or, in more technical terms -- they also render pages differently. It is possible to make pages that work well on all (or most) browsers, but you have to check.
   
   
6. Let the world know about your page. Departments should contact www@uic.edu to get listed on the UIC home page. Individuals should use the ACCC Directory Update Web page to publish their personal home page information.
   
   
7. When the info on your page changes, be sure to change your page. Out-of-date or wrong info on a page is worse than no page at all.

• Know how to use the Web. What do you mean, you don't know? You're reading this page, aren't you??! You can click, can't you?? The only thing you might not know much about are Uniform Resource Locators, called URLs. These are the funny geek-looking things like this: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/index.html The key is knowing what URL refers to your file. Here's a beginner's guide to URLs and here are more URL references.


• An ACCC account on a machine with an HTTP server running. If you haven't opened your ACCC account yet, get out your photo-id and go to the ACCC Make Account Web page.
  
  
• Know some Unix or learn how to use a personal computer Web page editor.
  
  
  • Personal Computer Web editors: The ACCC has a number of popular personal computer Web page editors in the public labs and in Server Services, including Dreamweaver. The ACCC gives a number of free seminars on Web editing; you'll find them useful whether you're just beginning or you want to be a Web-publishing wizard.
    
    
  • Learn Unix: Don't worry, even if you decided to go the Unix route, you don't have to know enough to be an expert. (So you can keep your current friends!) You may need to know a little about file permissions, but if you choose not to use a Unix text editor to create your files, you don't need much more.You can peruse our handouts. Here's one on basic Unix, which includes some info on the vi editor. Frankly, the editor is one of the hardest parts of Unix to deal with, but you do have a few choices, and again, you don't need to be an expert.

1. Log onto your Unix account (either tigger or icarus). )
   
   
2. Chances are you already have a public_html directory, but if you don't, make the directory and set the appropriate permissions for it:

   mkdir public_html
   chmod a+rx public_html

   (This only has to be done once.)
   
   
3. The Web server has to go though your home directory to get to your public_html directory, so you may have to change the permissions on it as well.

   chmod a+x .

   This change will allow the Web server to go through your home directory but not to touch any of your files or even see their names. (The dot -- period -- is Unix shorthand for the current directory.) It also only has to be done once.
   
4. Change your working directory so you're working in your public_html directory and copy the sample HTML file:

   cd public_html
   cp /usr/local/lib/www/sample.html homepage.html

5. By the way, you need to set permissions for each file you publish. The easiest way is to set the permissions for all files in the current directory, like this:

   chmod a+r *

   (But don't worry if you forget; we run a program each night on tigger and icarus that automatically sets proper permissions for all Web-related files in each account's public_html directory and in the departmental Web directories, too.)

Believe it or not, you just published your first page. Well, actually, you just published my sample as your home page. If your login id were "adabyron", and you followed my directions above, fire up a Web browser and check it out.

If your account is on icarus, the URL of your Web page would be:

http://www2.uic.edu/~adabyron/homepage.html

If your account is on tigger, it would be:

http://www.uic.edu/~adabyron/homepage.html

By the way, if you had named your file with the magic name index.html instead of homepage.html,
its URL could be:

http://www.uic.edu/~adabyron/

as well as the more mundane:

http://www.uic.edu/~adabyron/index.html
(Substitute your own netid for adabyron in the above, of course.)

1. What changes to make?
2. How to make them?

You could probably get by without knowing any HTML if you stick to the simplest of Web pages and use a personal computer Web editor such as Netscape Composer, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or Claris HomePage when you create and update them. But if you're going to be doing any serious Web authoring, you have to understand a little bit about HyperText Markup Language, or HTML.

HTML files are regular ASCII, human-readable files, but they have markup tags in them. You will need to know what tags are available in HTML and what effects they have. To my mind, the easiest way to understand this is to compare a HTML file with what appears on the Web when you view that file.

<html>
<head>
  <title> Title for My Page </title>
</head>

<body>

<h1> Bob's Home Page </h1>

Hi, I'm Bob.  No relation to Microsoft's Bob, because I have a brain.
Here's an inline picture:
 <img alt="picture of bob" src="http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/webpub/mobius.gif">
<br>And here is the same picture you can see when you
 <a href="http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/webpub/mobius.gif">click here.</a>
Do you see the difference between how the pictures are linked?
(These were bugs I eradicated from my programs.)

<p>

Here are things I like to do:</p>
<ol>
 <li> Eat pizza
 <li> Drink beer
</ol>

Seriously, I like to:
<ul>
 <li> Surf the Internet
 <li> Make Web pages
</UL>

<p>
 One key thing about the Web is the ability to make links to other
pages. <a href="http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/webpub/begin.html">Here's
an example</a> of a page I made.  
And here is a 
<a href="http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/webpub/begin.html#urls">similar 
example</a> that points inside the page.  See how it works?

<h2> This is a second level heading </h2>
 Look at other peoples' pages, and see how they achieve various effects.
And <i>have</i> <strong>fun</strong> <code>with</code> 
<pre>your</pre> <u>pages</u>.

<h2> Another heading </h2>

By the way, you can view this file as <a href="sample.html">rendered html</a>, 
in the usual way the Web works.
Or you can view it as <a href="sample.txt">
raw html</a> to see the underlying file, and how things work.  I did this
with a trick, but you can use most any browser to "view the source"
of a document, or even save the source to disk, to play with later.

</body>
</html>

Just compare the two and you'll see how it works.

There are lots of HTML tutorials on the Web, and I won't write out another one. Here are two; there are more in Related Links.

• HTML Tutorial from W3schools.com, is an excellent intro HTML tutorial.
• There's a list of other related tutorials and well as reference pages on HTML.

Also, the ACCC gives seminars on HTML; ACCC seminars and seminar materials:

• Introduction to HTML
• HTML Intermediate
• (and a whole bunch more; see the ACCC Seminars Web site for a complete list)

Learn a bit about the personal computer Web editor of your choice, ACCC seminars and seminar materials:

• Web Authoring with Netscape Composer
• Several seminars on Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Web Authoring Claris HomePage

When changing your files, you may want to put in links to other files you write, or to other peoples' files. To do so, you need to know the various rules for making URLs, and whether you want to use relative or absolute URLs.

• For beginners: HTML Tutorial
• And a few more details: LivingInternet.com's Addresses
• Other references: internet.com's Webopedia URL

The second and continuing part of publishing on the Web is making modifications to your HTML files. A classy way to go is to use an HTML-aware editor.

Alternatively, if you're willing to learn enough about a Unix editor to make the changes on the spot, that will also work well. But you must be willing to put in each tag explicitly, and to check for your mistakes. Pico is probably the easiest to learn, but we also have vi and emacs available. (All my pages were done using vi, for example.)

But if you want to log in to Unix any more, that's OK too. You don't have to. If you don't want to edit files on Unix, you'll have to transfer your files to a PC or Mac, edit them there, transfer them back to the Unix machine, and check them out with a Web browser. Then repeat. For file transfer to the ACCC Web machines, you shortly must use SFTP, Secure FTP. If the FTP application software that you have on your machine doesn't support SFTP, visit SFTP, Secure FTP and install the Windows or Mac version.

Web Publishing Without Unix explains how to upload and download your Web files and how to use your SFTP software to do all the necessary Unix tasks from your personal computer.

Alternatively, many HTML editors include SFTP, and allow you to transfer your files easily. Be sure to choose the SFTP option.

The very first place to go is the Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQ, that is posted to Netnews/Usenet. There are several relevant FAQs, but the WWW FAQ is a good place to start. And check out the comp.infosystems.www.* Netnews/Usenet groups, too.

The ACCC offers free seminars on many subjects, including Web publishing.

There are also books on the subject. Personally, I think you can learn more and faster just by surfing the Web. But if you want to curl up with some hardcopy, check out any bookstore with a computer books section.

And as you might imagine, there are lots of tools for Web providers. HTML editors, HTML checkers, link checkers, log analyzers, html converters, and so on. Some of these are available at UIC, and others are available on the Web.

And see also Help and Related Links.