Adding Your Personal
Web Page to physics.usc.edu

Every person with an account on physics (and related machines) may make personal information available to the Web. The following information applies only if you have an account on physics. In order to create your own WWW home page,

If it doesn't already exist, create a directory named public_html in your $HOME directory. You can do this by the following commands:
```
	cd
	mkdir public_html
```
Place all relevant files in this directory. These files are described below.
Set permissions as follows:
```
	cd
	chmod o+x  . 
	chmod o+x public_html
	chmod o+r  public_html/*
```
Don't miss the "." in the second line above!
Congratulations. The URL for your home page is now:
```
	http://physics.usc.edu/~username
```
where "username" (the part after the tilde) is replaced by your login username.

Required file

In your public_html directory you must have the following file:

index.html - a personal home page. From this document, you may include pointers into other documents within your public_html directory or any subdirectories. You may point to any valid URL on the Web, but you will not be able to refer to directories above your own public_html. That is, you can't use ".." to point to files in other directories of yours or others.

Strictly speaking, this file isn't needed, but it is the file which will be retrieved by the Web server when someone's browser asks for your URL ending in "~username". If there is no index file, the browser will list the contents of your public_html directory, which is usually not very interesting.

Help

For help in constructing your own home page in HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) files here are a few local helpful links:

Getting onto the Department Directory

You can make sure that your newly created home page is linked into the Department of Physics & Astronomy's Directory by using the add/update form available on each of the "People" Directories listed in the gray border on the left.

Problems

The "Help" documents listed above will answer most questions you should have. However, here is a quick answer to the most frequent question: "Why isn't my page showing up on my browser?" The problem usually lies with improperly set permissions.

In order for you (or anyone anywhere on the Internet) to see your Home Page, you have to

allow the file to be readable by anyone, and
give access for anyone to the directory chain in which the file resides. If they can't get to it, it doesn't matter whether it's readable or not.

Look up above in the instructions at the top of this page where it says "Set permissions...." In those commands, the "x" argument to chmod gives directory access to both your public_html directory, as well as your $HOME directory. (In general, you need access to every directory from the root of the filesystem all the way down to whatever file you're trying to publish, but above your $HOME directory, this is already done.)

The "r" argument to chmod makes the files in your public_html as well as the public_html directory readable -- but not your $HOME directory! As a rule, you don't want other people reading your $HOME directory; but you do have to give them access to it in order to reach through to your Home Page.

So what do you do if you can't see your own Home Page? Simple: just repeat the commands following "Set permissions...."

Department Policy on
Personal Web Pages

Last Updated: 20