Getting Started with Web Publishing

Regular HTML

As a user with a shell account on Idiom, you can publish your own Web pages. For simple pages, just create a directory in your home directory called public_html. cd mkdir public_html chmod a+x . public_html

Your home page will be accessed as http://www.idiom.com/~LOGIN where LOGIN is your account login name. Your home page lives in the file public_html/index.html.

To upload files, ftp to idiom.com and log in as yourself (LOGIN), not as anonymous. Change directories to public_html and then upload your files.

Once you've got a home page up, please let us know so that we can make a link to it.

File Permissions

The default file permissions allow every user on the system to read all of your web pages.

The web server runs as the user httpd and in the group httpd. All Idiom users are in the group users. Your web pages must be accessible to the web server in order for them to be served. To make them inaccessable to the rest of idiom's user community, remove group read permission on files and group execute permission on directories:

chmod g-r file ... chmod g-x directory ...

CGI scripts execute as you. They do not need to be readable by anyone but you.

Domain pages

If you want to publish under your own domain name, please sign up for Idiom's Virtual Hosting service. In addition to www.YOUR-DOMAIN, you'll also have ftp.YOUR-DOMAIN and all of your outgoing and incoming email will go through your domain.

When you get your virtual domain, we will create a directory for it. It will be in your home directory and named something like www.YOUR-DOMAIN. Put the files that you want to be published as part of your web page in that directory.

People who can help out

Many of Idiom's customers provide web page design services. Find them at http://www.idiom.com/websmiths.shtml

Reading Material

The web server used at Idiom is Apache 1.3b3

There is an online magazine about Apache that's worth checking out Apache Week.

The following book seems to be at least okay:

• "Build a Web Site" by Net.Genesis and Devra Hall, ISBN 0-7615-0064-2