Introduction
HTML
Creating your Web site on the server
Uploading your Web site to the U of C
Webdisk
Advanced topics

Introduction

Along with an e-mail account, access to the Internet, and server storage space, your IT user account allows you to create and publish your own Web site on the University of Calgary servers. Below you will find many resources, including an introduction to HTML coding, instructions on how to upload your site to the server, and more advanced topics.

For more information on the use of your web space see the IT Computing and Network Policies.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, is the language that web pages are written in. An Internet browser like Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer reads that language, and converts it into what you see on your screen. HTML is not hard to learn, but there are many WYSICTWYG (What You See Is Close To What You Get) HTML editors out there, such as, Mozilla Composer. Editors allow you to create web pages as you would word processing documents, without having to worry about learning the code.

IT has provided a brief guide to HTML code. There are many other editors and HTML resources on-line as well.

Publishing your Web site

The easiest way to publish web pages is to put them in the public area of your Webdisk. Your website's URL will be http://homepages.ucalgary.ca/~username.

You can also put your web pages on the general purpose Linux servers. However, this requires some Unix skills. On Linux your website's URL will be http://www.ucalgary.ca/~username.

For institutional websites your URL will be the rather long http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/departments/yournamehere. Upon request, we can create a shortcut like http://www.ucalgary.ca/yournamehere

Please send your requests to www@ucalgary.ca

We can also create a domain name just for your site, giving you a URL like http://www.yournamehere.ucalgary.ca or even http//www.yournamehere.org

This takes a bit of setup so there is a charge for doing so, except for the official Web site of each faculty and department. For more information, please see the Customized Web Domain Names page.

Building websites on your Webdisk

Your Webdisk automatically contains a folder called "public_html" that by default has public read-only access enabled. Any web pages or files stored in that folder are thus available to the public. For example, if user jbnimble created a Web page called thesis.html and stored it in their public_html folder, the public could access it with the URL: http://homepages.ucalgary.ca/~jbnimble/thesis.html

For more information about Webdisk, click here.

Building websites on Linux

If you have created a website on your PC or Mac, and you wish to store it on the Linux server, you will need a file transfer program to upload your files. We recommend SSH Secure Shell Client for Windows and Fugu for Macintosh; both use SFTP to provide a secure and reliable connection. For more information on Secure connections see SSH On Windows or SSH On Macintosh. For information on using FTP and Mozilla Composer see FTP software or Mozilla Composer.

Once your site has been uploaded, you will have to tell the server you want people to be able to see it. To do this, you will have to set the permissions on the directories that contain your site. We recommend that you use the utility at the IT Utilities page for Enable Access to a Web Folder and all of its Sub-Folders. You can also set permission manually following the instructions on Setting Linux Permissions Manually.

Additional information about Linux-based websites is available at:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/web/hosting/faq

Advanced topics

Once you get beyond the basics, check out the advanced topics.