Creating a Website on a RUF Account

Note: These instructions apply to Owlnet accounts as well, if you substitute 'owlnet' in place of all references to 'ruf'.

Your RUF account comes with a web site that can be viewed by people both on and off campus. The URL for your site is:

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~your_username/

where your_username is your RUF username.

Accessing Your Web Site

Your web site is located inside your home directory. The files comprising your web site are located in the public_html folder. There are a number of ways to access this folder, which are listed below:

• Using an FTP Program on Your Computer
  FTP programs allow users to access their web space, and this is exactly what you can do with your RUF web space. These programs vary greatly, but you will need to make a new connection and input the RUF server (ftp.ruf.rice.edu), your username, and your password into the corresponding fields to connect.
• Mounting Your Home Directory on Your Computer
  Instructions on how to mount your home directory can be found at http://www.rice.edu/it/owlnet/homedir.html#mount. The public_html folder should be contained in the mounted drive.
• Using SSH from Your Computer
  Instructions on how to use SSH can be found at http://www.rice.edu/it/owlnet/homedir.html#ssh. You can use SSH to execute UNIX commands on your public_html folder.

If you’ve placed files in your public_html directory, you may have noticed that visiting your web site simply presents you with a list of files in that directory. This will be the case until you create a file called index.html or index.htm in your public_html directory. Once you do that, the browser will automatically load the index file instead of displaying a list of files.

Creating Your Home Page

The index.html file will be the home page loaded when people visit your web site. There are many ways to create the index.html file. You can write code by hand, but this requires a basic knowledge of HTML. A brief introduction to HTML can be found at http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html. HTML code can be written by hand in any text editor. After writing the code, you should save the file with a .html extension and store it inside your public_html directory.

Another method to write HTML files is with a graphical editor. These programs allow you to view your web site as you create it. For example, inserting an image and a table would look like the following:

There are a number of graphical web page editors, but some of the most popular ones are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive.

Server Programming

As a protective measure, Rice does not allow server-side scripts to run on their servers. This means that you can’t incorporate PERL or other CGI scripts into your Owlnet web site. However, Rice does provide a few useful scripts that you can use:

• yamform – e-mail the content of a form to yourself or someone else.
• counter – keep track of the number of visitors to your web site.

***For further information on on how to design and build a website, see the Tools for Building a Site page or the World Wide Web Resources page.***