2. Web Space & Addresses

OUCS provides registered Nexus users with an allocation of additional web space with their email accounts.  This free space can be used to house your web site. Each space has an address or 'URL' (Universal Resource Locator) associated with it so that the pages stored on the server can be accessed over the Internet.

Users wishing to publish personal web pages must first activate their Linux and Web Space Accounts. This is an easy and quick process! Both accounts are part of your Oxford Account used to access Nexus and WebLearn.

2.1. Activating Your Web Space Account

To activate your web space go to https://register.it.ox.ac.uk/accman/web/ where you will see the following web page:

Click the activate button to setup your web space
Figure 1. Activating your web space

Just click on the Activate button to set up your web space. Once done you will then see details of your web space account:

View quota, Set web statistics and add site to personal pages index
Figure 2. Users web space information screen

Your filestore on the web server has a set quota of 15 megabytes.

The web space account page also lets you add your name to an index of personal web sites. You can also set up site statistics through this page which will show you how many visitors have viewed your site on a weekly basis.

2.2. Activating your Linux Account

In order to use your activated web space you also need to quickly activate your Linux account via the registration page at: https://register.it.ox.ac.uk/accman/shell

Linux Account Activation Screen.
Figure 3. Linux Account Activation Screen

Click on the Activate Shell Account button. The account will now be active and you will see the following screen:

Activated Linux account screen.
Figure 4. Linux Account Activated Screen

You can change the type of login shell you use from the dropdown box, but for most users the default option is fine.

Please note: If you are working on linux.ox.ac.uk, you will be able to see your web space within 15 minutes of its activation. After this time it can be reached via Secure FTP.

2.3. More About Your Web Space

All personal web pages at Oxford University have URLs of the form: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~username where username is replaced by your own Oxford Single Sign-On (SSO) username. N.B. the `~' is critical in the URL.

So if your SSO username is merlin, the URL to your personal Web directory is http://users.ox.ac.uk/~merlin/

The directory in your filestore which corresponds to the URL is called public_html; this where the files which you want to publish should go. This is where your URL points to.

You should make a HTML file called index.html which people will see as your Welcome (or home page) document when accessing your site. This file should be put in the public_html directory. If index.html does not exist, the server will return a document listing all the files in the directory. Since this is not desirable, you should always make sure there is an index.html file in your public_html directory, even if it just contains a link to somewhere else.

Web pages can be prepared in a text editor, word processing package or html editor. OUCS runs a variety of web publishing courses that will help you make the best of your site.

N.B. There is another directory called cgi/bin. This folder should be used if you want to develop safe perl programs, see User-written CGI programs for more information.

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