Step 8: Putting Your Pages Online

Putting your Web pages into your www subdirectory

You've created your Web pages on your local machine and set up a www subdirectory for them with appropriate access privileges in your personal Unity file space. Now you're ready to put your pages into www so they can be accessed by NC State's www4 Web server and viewed by the public. The transfer procedure will depend upon the kind of computer you use and its network connection. Below are the procedures for transferring files from either a Unity lab or another location.

Transferring your Web pages from a Unity lab. . .

If you are in one of the Office of Information Technology's Unity Computer Labs or a college computing facility that has been fully integrated into the Unity computing environment, you can transfer files from one of these workstations:

• Windows
  Navigate to the location where you have stored your Web pages. Click on the My Documents icon on the workstation desktop. You will see the contents of your home directory, including the www subdirectory. Drag and drop your Web pages and their associated files (e.g., images), if any, into your www subdirectory.
  
  
• Unix
  The files you save on this workstation will automatically go into your Unity home directory. To take advantage of the shortened URL available on the www4 server, be sure to move your Web pages as well as any associated files (e.g., images) into your www subdirectory.
  
  
• Macintosh
  Navigate to the folder where you have stored your Web pages. Click on the My AFS folder icon in the workstation's AdminLauncher window. When it opens, you will see the contents of your home directory, including the www subdirectory. Drag and drop your Web pages and their associated files (e.g., images), if any, into your www subdirectory.

Transferring your Web pages from home or other remote computer...

If you are using a computer in either of these two situations:

• at home
• on campus but not connected directly to the campus network

then you will need to install and use a secure file transfer program if one is not already available. WinSCP (for Windows) and Fugu (for Macintosh) are free and available on the HELP! CD, which is distributed to new students in the summer. Software from the previous year's version of the CD is available online. If you are on campus, ask the technical staff in your college or department about secure file transfer software. Here's how to make the transfer:

1. Open your secure file transfer program.
2. Connect to the secure NC State host: ftp.ncsu.edu
3. Log in using your Unity ID and password. You will be logged in to your home directory in your Unity file space.
4. In most file transfer programs, you will see a window divided into two sections. The "local" section shows the files on your local machine's hard drive, and the "remote" section shows the files in your personal Unity file space. You can identify each section by the folders and files listed in it.
5. In the local section of the window, navigate to the folder on your local machine that contains your Web page. The method for navigation will depend on the file transfer program you are using.
6. In the remote section of the window, open the www subdirectory in your Unity file space.
7. In the local section of the window, select the Web page you want to transfer.
8. Drag and drop this page into your www subdirectory.
9. Be sure to also transfer any associated files (e.g. images) that your Web page needs.

URL for a Web page in your www subdirectory

Each Web page you put into your www subdirectory automatically has a URL. People will need to know this in order to view your page, and you will need it if you want to make a hyperlink to this page from another one. The easiest URL format to use for Web pages in www is the shortened one, which has a tilde (~):

      http://www4.ncsu.edu/~userid/file.html

To use this format, replace
      userid with your Unity ID.
      file.html with the file name of the Web page in your www subdirectory.

Example:

If John D. Doe, whose Unity ID is jddoe, has transferred the page named home.htm to his www subdirectory, its URL will be:
      http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jddoe/home.htm

URL for a page in a subfolder

If you have only a few Web pages you can probably just keep them in your www subdirectory. On the other hand, if you have many, you may want to organize them into subfolders. In this case, the URL for a page will show a longer path; i.e., the sequence of subfolders you would have to open in order to get to that page.

Examples:

If John D. Doe created a subfolder named mystuff in www and then transferred a page named pets.html into it, the URL for that page would be:
      http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jddoe/mystuff/pets.html

If he created a folder named vacations inside the mystuff subfolder, and then transferred a page named beach.htm into the vacations folder, the page's URL would be:
      http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jddoe/mystuff/vacations/beach.htm

Go back to Step 7: Granting access to your pages

Return to the Introduction

Last modified June 24, 2008 by cawalker