How to put your MIT home page on the Web: A Quick Guide

If you are part of the MIT Community, you will find this document helpful for getting started with a new home page. This is a simple 3-step program!

Create your initial ~/www directory
Develop your initial home page
Mail webmaster@mit.edu

The first thing to do, of course, is setup a place to store your home pages. On Athena, we suggest you make a world-readable directory for all your html documents.

The current suggestion for a directory is ~/www. You might do:

athena% mkdir ~/www

athena% fs sa ~/www system:anyuser read

The first line creates the directory, the second makes it (and only it) readable to anyone. You might want to have a friend try to look at the files to make sure it worked if you're not sure. Note that other MIT services may eventually list your home page if you have a ~/www directory. If you don't want your home page listed on web.mit.edu, you should use another directory name (eg ~/WWW).

Next you should add some content! That's what the web is full of, right? Or was it of something else? Anyway, for this you should understand the basics of writing in HTML. Also, stylisticly speaking, the webmasters currently recommend Jake Harris's, Sal Valente's, Bridget Spitznagel's, and Eri Izawa's home pages as examples. Note that HTML documents must end in ".html". And please, do your part in saving the world by not using the annoying <blink> tag.

Finally fill out the form below or email the pathname of your home page to webmaster@mit.edu. Don't forget to include your name as you wish to have it listed. You will receive an email response when your page has been added. Waiting time ranges from seconds to days depending on our hosage. Although your home page can be accessed from many URLs, we will give you a new URL in the form of:

http://www.mit.edu/people/username/home.html

Do not be alarmed when you see this new URL. It simply points to your ~/www/home.html file. Many people submit web.mit.edu URLs; we will always create a new www.mit.edu URL when we receive a request.

Your username:               (eg, jflorey)

The path to your home page: 

Name as it is to be listed:  (eg, Jack Florey III)
 
(We only accept real names for proper indexing)

If none of the above suggestions apply to you, or you need some additional help, please send mail to webmaster@mit.edu and we'll try to help you out.

Note: at various times of the year (like the beginning of the new academic year), the webmasters may fall behind in adding pages due to a flood of requests or general hosedness. You may have to wait about a week at such times (hey, we have classes & jobs, too! :). But, while you're waiting, we recommend that you polish up your homepage. If you're on Athena, you can look at your homepage by opening the file in AFS. For example, if your username was jflorey (type "o" on your Mosaic screen, choose 'Open URL'; type 'g' if you're using lynx; use open file in Netscape):

http://www.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/j/f/jflorey/dir/name.html

where "/j/f/jflorey" is replaced by your username, "/dir" is replaced by the directory, and "name.html" is replaced by whatever you named your file.

webmaster@mit.edu