Personal Home Page Information

How Can I Get Started On The Web?

To publish a web page on the Statistics Department webserver, go through the following steps. This should take about 30 minutes.

Note:The term Home Page has come to mean two different things. Some people refer to a page that describes a person or institution as its "Home Page." Others think a "Home Page" is a page you create for your own use that contains a list of links to the sites you visit frequently. The page you are creating is of the first type.

What you should have in front of you
Chances are you have probably completed most of this step already. This document assumes you are logged into the console of a UNIX or Windows workstation in the Statistics department, and that you are running Mozilla to view this page. If you are using some other browser or you aren't logged into a CS computer, some of the instructions below won't work and might not make sense, and you will have to move or be prepared to improvise.

You will probably want to read both this document and the page you are editing at the same time. To make that easier, create a second browser window:
- In Mozilla: File New | Navigator Window
In addition to a browser, you should have a window with a shell available because you will be typing a few commands. Finally, you should have your favorite text editor in a fourth window. This document doesn't assume any HTML-specific editor modes; you will be editing the file directly. Make sure you can switch between the windows easily.
Create your public WWW directory
If you have never put a document on the web, you will need to create your publicly accessible WWW directory.

On UNIX systems:

Execute the following command in your shell:
% mkdir ~/public/html

On Windows NT systems:

Create a directory called:
U:\public\html

This directory is where you will keep all of your web documents. It has a special place in the namespace of our web server.
Copy the sample home page

On UNIX systems:

Execute the following command:
% cp /common/www/home-sample.html ~/public/html/index.html

On Windows NT systems:

In your GUI, drag and drop the file W:\common\www\home-sample.html to U:\public\html and rename it to index.html

This file contains a WWW page for you to personalize.
Edit the file Edit the file you just created. What you do to do this depends on the editor you are using. The first few lines of the file look like this:
```
        <HTML>
        <HEAD>
        <TITLE>Felix's Home Page</TITLE>
        <HEAD>
        <BODY>
Don't change anything yet.
```
View the document in Mozilla. In the other Mozilla window you created, choose File | Open... from the menu (File | Open File... in Mozilla). A dialog box with a text field and some buttons will appear. If there is anything in the text field, press the Clear button. Now type http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~<username>/ in the text field. In the other browser window, you should now see your page. If you didn't name your page index.html, there should be a short list of directories and files, one of which is your page. Just as the string ~<username>/public/html or U:\public\html is a complete path in the filesystem pointing to your web directory, the URL http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~<username>/ is a complete path to that same directory in the web namespace.
Examine the file Take a look at the file in your text editor to get a general idea of the format of an HTML document. Bear in mind that tabs, space, and newlines seperate words, but otherwise do not matter to the finished product. Any combination of "whitespace" is treated as a single space. While there is a blank line between paragraphs in the sample file, it is the <P> tags that cause space to be included in the output. HTML is too big a topic to cover here. We will only discuss the <TITLE> and <BODY> tags.
Edit the title The third line of the sample page looks like this: <TITLE>Felix's Home Page</TITLE>. If you look at the top of the browser window, you'll see that the string in the <TITLE> container is displayed there. Different browsers use the title in different ways. The title should be short and summarize the contents of the document. In this case, you can replace "Felix" with your own name. After you have made this change, save the file without exiting your editor and press the Reload button in your other browser window. The new title should appear. From now on, whenever you make changes to the file, you can save it in your editor and reload it into your browser to see the result.
Edit the body The body is everything between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. The body is where you put your text, entities, and most of the elements. The sample file has a number of elements you might want to use in your own page. As you look at the sample page in your editor and in your web browser, it should become clear what the different elements do in whatever browser you are using right now. Different browsers have different interpretations of the tags. That's important, so I'll say it again:
Note:Different browsers have different interpretations of the tags. Things will look different if you move between browsers

Here's a list of the different tags, and common interpretations of them.

<STRONG>

Makes the text "stronger". Often, this means bold.

<EM>

Emphasized text. Often, this means italic text.

<H1>

Creates a first-level section heading.

<P>

Separates paragraphs.

<UL>

Creates an unordered (bulleted) list

<LI>

Creates a list item within a list container (like <UL>).

<A>

Creates a link to another document

<IMG>

Includes a picture

There are a number of elements not included in the sample document. Here are some of the more common ones.

<H2> through <H6>

These work exactly like <H1>, but create progressivly lower-level headings, for subsections, subsubsections, etc.

<OL>

Works like <UL>, but creates an ordered (numbered) list

<HR>

Creates a horizontal rule

<BR>

Creates a line break

Two of the included tags, <A> and <IMG>, had attributes. The <A> container was used to create a link to another document, which was specified by the HREF="/personalhomepageinfo.htm" attribute. In this case, that document creates a document with the result. Note that the path (URL) to the document starts with a "/". When you link from one document to another in the Web, you can refer to the new location relative to the current one. In this case, we could omit the http://www.stat.wisc.edu because both documents are on the same server.

The <IMG> tag, as we said before, is used to include a picture. The picture should be either a JPEG or GIF file. the SRC attribute is used to specify the location of the picture. The filenames of JPEG files must end end in either .jpeg or .jpg and GIF filenames must end in the extension .gif. If you had a GIF file called me.gif and you wanted to include it in your document, you could put it in the same directory the document is located, and use the tag <IMG SRC="me.gif" ALT="A picture of me!">. The ALT attribute specifies a string to be printed if a browser cannot display pictures.

Now that you know what the elements do, you should figure out what you want to say (the hard part), and then use the tags and text to create "look" you want. Remember that, although you can preview what you create in your web browser as you go along, the "look" in Mozilla or may not be the "look" in a different browser.
Read more The following are some links to other sites, with more comprehensive HTML tutorials, references, and validators.
See Also:
- An Introduction to HTML
- The Web Design Group has references on HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- W3C HTML Validation Service

Where Do I Put My Web Pages?

User web pages go in a special directory in your public directory.

On UNIX systems:: ~/public/html
On Windows NT systems:: U:\public\html

The web server maps this directory to http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~<username>/ (where <username> is, of course, your username) If the html directory does not exist in your public directory, create it, and the web server will look there for your web pages.

How Do I Get My Page Linked Into The Stat Web Directories.

Send and email to lab@stat.wisc.edu requesting your personal home page link be created on our web site directories.