Creating a personal web page
Instructions for placing web pages on the www.tidewater.net server
Each subscriber to tidewater.net is allocated up to 5 megabytes of disk space on the server for their own files, which can include web pages. These pages may be used for presenting any desired information the user would care to display, keeping in mind the Acceptable Use Policy agreed to by all tidewater.net subscribers.Each subscriber is allocated a directory on our server machine. This directory is: /home/USERNAME/www where each user would substitute his or her own username. For example, the user jsmith would have the directory /home/jsmith/www for placing web page information. The information placed there would then be available to people browsing the web at the URL: http://www.tidewater.net/~USERNAME. Again, the actual username would be substituted for USERNAME.
When a web browser accesses our server with a specified username, the server will attempt to find a file called index.html in the user's www directory. If it isn't found, then the server will respond with a directory listing of the files that are in the user's www directory. It's important that you do not place any files in your www directory that you don't want others to see. Your www directory is public and all files in it are publicly available.
Steps for creating web pages
Create the web pages on your home machine. Each web page is a file that contains the information you wish to make public along with the HTML codes that tell browsers such as Internet Explorer how to display this information. Your opening page should be named index.html since this is what our server will be looking for. Within index.html you may point to other html files and these may be named whatever you like. If you know the HTML codes, you may create the documents with any text ed itor such as Notepad in Windows. If you would like help with the HTML codes, there are many good books on the subject and several programs that will place the HTML codes for you. There are also a number of online tutorials about HTML and web programming. Check the Helpful Web Sites section at the end of these instructions for more information on finding those sites and downloading those programsUpload these files to our web server. Use an FTP program such as WS-FTP to transfer the files from your home machine to our webserver. Use the commands on your local FTP program to connect to www.tidewater.net and supply your username and password. You will be remotely connected to our webserver and will currently be pointed to your home directory of /home/USERNAME. Use the cd (change directory) command to change to the www directory. Then transfer the HTML documents and any image files necessary from your local machine to the www directory. If you are using an IBM PC compatible, be sure to change the file extension from .htm to .html during or after the transfer. FTP programs may be found at software sites mentioned in the Helpful Web Sites section below.
Test your web pages on the new server. Use Internet Explorer, Firefox or another web browser to see what those pages look like on our server. Most likely, they will look the same on our server as they did when you tested them on your local machine, but it's always a good idea to check. Also make sure all links from one file to another are working properly. If you need to make any changes, make them on your local machine and then ftp the files to the server again. The new versions will overwrite the previously uploaded versions.
Definitions of terms
- HTML - Hypertext Markup Language. The codes placed in a document that allows a web browser to display the document properly.
- FTP - File Transfer Protocol. A program that transfers files from the local computer to a remote computer on the Internet. The person using FTP must have a username and password on the remote computer system.
- URL - Universal Resource Locator. The method of specifying Internet addresses to web browser software.
- Web Browser - A program that allows the user to see information stored on the Internet on web pages located on web servers. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Chrome are examples of web browsers.
- Web Server - A computer on the Internet that stores the web page information and sends copies to a web browser which requests it.
