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Setting up a personal website

Anyone having an account at DICT can set up a personal website. You need to do the following:

1. Create your website files. The start page gets the name index.html (case sensitive).

For the creation of a website several possibilities exist, all well described in several tutorials you can find on the internet. To publish webpages on one of our servers, the following requirements need to be kept in mind:

• As the webserver is a Unix-server, filenames are case-sensitive. This means that the file Index.html is a different file from index.html. Bear this in mind when creating your own website.
• The startpage has to be named index.html (lower case). In this manner, after transferring the files to the server, the website will be available on the internet.
  The URL (web address) has this form:

  https://users.UGent.be/~login name/
  

  Attention: if you enter a name other than index.html for the home page, then, when navigating to the above URL, a list of all files in the directory will be displayed, which is not desirable.

2. Transferring the files to your web space (your "WWW folder" on the web server)

You can transfer the website you just created to the server, by copying the files to your web space.

To learn how you can connect to ("mount") a network drive, please consult "Mounting network drives". Copying files from your local computer to a network drive is analogous to copying files between two folders on the same computer.

The web space is located on webhost.

\\webhost\<loginnaam>

The web space is also available via files.

\\files\<login name>\www\users

When mounting the web space, you access the WWW directory.

Please note that if you wish to update your website from home, you need to have access to your web space.
There are 2 ways to do this:

• either via https://athena.ugent.be. In the 'Office' folder you find an explorer ('File Explorer') which gives access to your network drives. Access to internal information works as if you would use VPN.
• or you first establish a VPN connection and then you mount the network drive.

3. Test your website

If you have created an index.html file and transferred it to the web space, then you can have a look at your website. Surf to https://users.UGent.be/~loginname.

4. Useful information

• When creating and publishing your website, the permissions are set correctly by default. This is the setting that describes what eduserv or webhost users have access to your files. For HTML-files this is 644: read and write access for the owner of the file and read access for all others. When using scripts, you need to alter the permissions, so the files are executable. In most cases, they need to be set to readable as well (e.g. 755 read, write and execute for the owner of the file and read and execute for all others).
  
• You can limit the access to your WWW-pages by means of htaccess and htpasswd.
• For interactive access to personal and shared web space: a server with the name webssh.ugent.be was set up. See: Interactive login - Access to central disk space.
• Extras available on webhost: Scripts: php (up to version 4.3.10-15) and perl, python, shell scripts and linux binaries can be used via cgi.
  Other server-side technologies can not be enabled (so, no server-side java, asp etc.). Client-side technologies, such as javascript, and depending on the browser used, will function normally because these are not linked to the server and will be possible.
• The use of cgi scripts is possible, but don't use any scripts of which you don't fully understand the function. We will not be able to help you with any scripts if you don't understand them yourself.
• We would like to warn you for (statistics) tools which generate ads, which is not according the rules of proper use!