Writing on the Web

In August 1994, Fine Hall acquired a web server. A web server is a daemon, a process running continually that listens for requests from clients. This makes it possible for us to publish on the WWW.

If you make an individual home page, you are responsible for seeing that everything you place in the directory public_html conforms to the Princeton University Guidelines for Use of the Campus and Network Computing Resources.

How to make a home page

In your home directory, enter

mkdir public_html
chmod 755 public_html
cd public_html
echo hello world >index.html
chmod 644 index.html

and you are on the WWW!

Making the home page useful

Send email to www-info and we will establish a link on the departmental home page. Undergraduates majoring in mathematics: you can establish a home page on phoenix. (If you have not already done so, the instructions are identical.) Send email to www-info@math if you want it linked to the department.

You will want your home page to say something more useful than ``hello world''. The simplest way is this: make a subdirectory of public_html, say pub. Place any documents you want to make available to everyone on the WWW in this directory pub. Then you could make your home page as simple as

My name is David Hilbert. 
Here are my <a href="pub">public files</a>.

This will appear as

My name is David Hilbert. Here are my public files.

(This link is dead, because we do not have a subdirectory pub of our public_html.) Then anyone selecting the link ``public files'' will have a directory of all the files and subdirectories of your pub directory, and can read them by selecting the links.

Anything you place in public_html or (recursively) in a subdiretory of it is potentially readable on the web. Files should have permissions 644 and directories should have permission 755. (This is usually automatic.)

``Potentially'' means the following: if readers know how, they can get an ordinary index of any subdirectory of public_html, but the index of public_html is your home page (that's why it's called index.html). You could if you wished do the same in subdirectories. So far as I know, there is no way for readers on the web to see a file in public_html unless they know its filename, so you need to make a link to it.

Nothing outside of public_html is visible to the web. A URL of the form http://www.math.princeton.edu/~hilbert/sub1/whatever points to the file ~hilbert/public_html/sub1/whatever

Creating HTML documents

The HTML HyperText Markup Language is easy to learn. See the NCSA primer and the Additional References at the end of the primer. Also, you can copy someone's document as a model: use the Save To Local Disk option.

There is as yet no satisfactory way to include mathematical formulas in HTML.

If you want help with any of this don't hesitate to

contact www-info@math.princeton.edu

To the Common Room or the departmental home page.