Creating a Personal Website in the Physics Department

Last modified: 21 August 2008

Most people in the deparmtne already have the directory setup on their account used for their personal website. To me sure, you can logon to your io.physics.tamu.edu account via a Secure Shell (ssh) verify the existance of a directory (folder) named public_html.

If it does not exist, create it using the command:
    mkdir -v public_html

Change the permissions of both public_html and your main "home directory" ("~") so that they can be read by apache (the webserver):
    chmod -v 755 public_html ~

Once the directory exists, you can begin placing the files for your website into the public_html directory.

The URL (address) for faculty members will be:     http://faculty.physics.tamu.edu/userid/.
For everyone else, the URL will be:     http://people.physics.tamu.edu/userid/
(where "userid" is your logon-id).

Placing files on your account
If you are using a Windows or MacOSX computer in your office, the easiest way to get files into your public_html is to connect your computer directly to the server.

• In Windows terms, you will "map a network drive". To do this, double click on My Computer, under Tools select Map a Network Drive. This will bring up a window asking for a Drive letter and a Folder.
  For the drive letter, I usually pick "P" (for "Physics").
  For the Folder, use \\Samba.physics.tamu.edu\userid


• In MacOSX terms you will use the "connect to server".

If you need to transfer files from your computer to your website, you will need to use a "scp" program. Linux users can use the "scp" command; Windows users can install a free program called "WinSCP"; Mac users can install a free program called "Fugu". The host to transfer these files is io.physics.tamu.edu.

Couple of Points of Interest
(1) You will want to be sure the first page you want displayed is named index.html. The webserver will look for a file with that name when automatically.

(2) If you want to just place a bunch of files in a directory so people can download them (without having to code any html), you will need to save the file index.php to that directory. Note that need to SAVE AS the file linked - do not simple click on the link)