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Creating a personal home page on Mypage

UITS provides Mypage for serving personal web pages. Anyone with a Network ID may create a personal web page on Mercury and publish it using Mypage. The Mypage service removes the burden of serving web pages from IU's general-purpose Unix systems.

To learn about the policies for posting information on Mypage, see Policies for personal web pages

On this page:

Information about Mercury/Mypage accounts

The Mypage service at Indiana University is for personal web pages only. Mypage is a great place to share your resume, your research findings, and even your family photos. If you will be using your web pages for official IU business (e.g. instruction, research, administration), you should probably request an account on IU's central web server, Webserve, which hosts accounts on www.indiana.edu, www.iupui.edu, www.iuk.edu, and www.iun.edu. Accounts on Webserve offer access to some web utilities not available through Mypage. For more, see the IU Webmaster's Accounts page. To determine which account (Mypage or Webserve) is best for you, read about the differences between the two.

Mypage pages are hosted on Mercury; that is where you will log in and create, upload, or update your pages. If you have an IU Network ID but not a Mercury account, you can create one using the Account Management Service (AMS). Visit:

https://itaccounts.iu.edu/

Log in with your Network ID and follow the instructions for creating a Mercury account. Your account should be available within an hour after you create it.

Your Mercury account has a quota of 1GB. Quota increases are not currently available.

Note: The IU South Bend Mypage service is different from the Mypage service noted here; see IUSB's Web Publishing: Mypage.

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Making a secure connection

To log into your account on Mercury or upload files to it, you must use a secure client like SSH Secure Shell for Windows, or MacSSH or MacSFTP for Macintosh. For help, see:

If you use an HTML editor (e.g., Dreamweaver), you can use the software's built-in upload feature to move files to Mercury only if it permits secure uploads. Check the program's documentation for information about secure file transfer.

To connect to Mercury, use the server name mercury.uits.indiana.edu. Log in with your IU Network ID username and passphrase.

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Creating your personal home page

Learning HTML

Web pages are ordinary text files that also contain some special instructions, or tags, to tell web browsers how to handle the text. For example, some tags create links or give text a special appearance. These tags constitute HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

Many online resources are available for learning how to use HTML to create web pages, for example:

At IU Bloomington and IUPUI, IT Training & Education offers a number of workshops that will help you learn about creating web pages, including creating and working with graphics. You can browse workshops by topic to view the current offerings.

You can also learn a great deal about HTML by looking at the source text (text coded with HTML tags) of pages already on the web. Your browser can usually show you the source of any web page you are viewing. For more information, see Viewing HTML source code

Choosing a tool for writing and editing HTML files

You have the following options for writing and editing your HTML files:

  • You can use the text editors Nano and vi on Mercury. Nano is similar to Pico, and if you are familiar with Nano, Pico, or vi, this is probably the easiest and most convenient way to create or edit your pages. For example, enter nano home-template.html to use Nano to edit the template home page file created automatically in your www directory.

    Note: If you edit the template file created by spinweb to create your home page, you may want to rename it from home-template.html to simply home.html. To do so, at the Unix prompt, enter:

    mv home-template.html home.html
  • You can also create web pages on your computer at home or in your office, using any text editor or word processor with which you are familiar. Some of these programs, such as WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, and BBedit, come with tools that assist in creating HTML documents.

    Note: If you use a word processing program, make sure to save the file you create as a plain text file (or as HTML text, if that option is available) rather than the default word processing file format. Also, if you create your files using a word processor or an HTML editor on a home, office, or Student Technology Center (STC) computer, you will need to transfer them to Mercury. See Uploading your files below.

  • You can use an HTML program specifically designed for creating web pages (for example, Adobe Dreamweaver). These programs help you manage HTML tags and format your text.

    If you use an HTML editor with built-in file-transfer capabilities, you can upload files to Mercury only if the program permits secure file transfer. For help, consult the software's documentation.

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Naming your home page

For your page to be listed in the Directory of Personal Home Pages, your home page must be named home.html. If you don't want your page listed in the directory, choose one of the following alternative filenames for your home page: home.htm, home.shtml, index.html, index.htm, or index.shtml. If you do not use any of these filenames, the URL http://mypage.iu.edu/~username (where username is your username) will return an error.

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Working with your pages on the server

Uploading your files

Once you have created your web pages, you'll need to make sure they're in the proper place in your Mercury account.

If you created your web page on Mercury using Nano from within your www directory (where username is your username), your files are already in the right place.

However, if you created a web page on an STC workstation or personal computer, you will need to move the file to Mercury. You need to use a secure FTP (SFTP) program such as MacSFTP for Macintosh or SSH Secure Shell for Windows. For help, see:

Navigating on Mercury

Because Mercury is a Unix system, you may want to familiarize yourself with basic Unix commands. See:

In particular, note the following commonly used commands:

  • To see all the files in the directory that you're in, enter ls.

  • To create a new subdirectory, enter mkdir directoryname (replace directoryname with the name of the subdirectory you'd like to create). If you have problems viewing files in the new subdirectory in a browser, run spinweb at the command line on Mercury.

  • To move to a different directory, enter cd directoryname (replace directoryname with the name of the directory to which you'd like to move).

If your Unix configuration files ever become corrupt or stop working, you can run the ezreset command to back up the current configuration files and replace them with the versions included with new accounts. For more, see At IU, what is ezreset, and how can I use it to reset my accounts to their default settings?

Spinweb and file permissions

The correct file permissions should be set by default so that your pages will be visible to you and to others in a web browser. If you have trouble viewing your pages, run spinweb while logged into your Mercury account. This should correct any problems and ensure that the permissions are set correctly on your www directory and any subdirectories.

Alternately, you can set proper permissions by using the Unix chmod command. While logged into Mercury and at your home directory, enter chmod -R 755 ~/www. This command sets the permission on ~/www and all files and directories within it so they are accessible via the web.

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Accessing your personal home page

Once your files are in place and the permissions are set correctly, you can view your personal home page by using a web browser to go to a URL similar to the following:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/

Replace username with your username. This URL will take you to the home.html file in your www directory. Thus, the full URL for your home page will be the following, with username replaced by your username:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/home.html

For files other than home.html that are in the top level of the www directory, the URL must include the filename. For instance, if your username is dvader and you have a file in your www directory called secrets.html, the URL for the secrets.html page would be:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~dvader/secrets.html

If the file is inside a subdirectory of the www directory, its URL includes the name of that directory, the / (slash) character, and the filename. For example, if dvader has a directory called death-star inside his www directory, and the death-star directory contains a file called blueprints.html, the URL for blueprints.html would be:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~dvader/death-star/blueprints.html

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Controlling who can see your pages

You may serve personal pages over a secure server. Newly created Mercury accounts automatically have a wwws directory. You can have some control over who is able to view your web pages by using .htaccess files in your wwws directory and its subdirectories. For more information, see the IU Webmaster's Controlling Web Page Access. The information refers to Webserve, but also applies to Mercury.

Be especially careful that your permissions are set correctly, and keep in mind that you can specify access by IU Network ID only in your wwws directory. If you had a Steel account with .htaccess files in your www directory, they will no longer function as expected. Move those pages and their .htaccess files to your wwws directory.

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Sharing files with others through your personal home page

Your Mypage space is a good way to share files with others outside of IU. To upload the file you would like to share, make a secure FTP connection to Mercury as described above (for information on transferring files, see In SSH Secure Shell for Windows, how do I transfer files? or In Mac OS X, how do I use Cyberduck to transfer files?). Once you transfer the file, run spinweb to make sure the file permissions are set correctly. When you have done that, others can access the file. If it is in your www directory on Mercury, the URL will be similar to the following:

http://mypage.iu.edu/~username/filename

Replace username with your username, and filename with the name of the file you uploaded.

For information about limiting access to your files, see Limiting access to web pages

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Publicizing your personal home page

You have the following options for letting others know about your personal home page:

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