Wharton Computing Student Support

Making and Modifying Your Home Page

• Making a home page
• Making changes to your home page
• Students Web Server Capabilites

Making a home page

To compose a website, follow these steps:

• Connect to the server that hosts your webspace (eg: Students).
• At the > prompt type the command makehome. This will create a public_html folder which you must use to store all of your webpage files.
• Compose your webpage by using HTML code or a basic web editor program.
  Note: Wharton's servers do not support Front Page extensions or cgi scripts.
• Using a File Transfer Program (FTP) transfer your webpage files to the public_html folder on the Wharton server that hosts your webspace.

Your webpage address will look something like this: http://server.wharton.upenn.edu/~username Where you see the word server replace it with the name of the server that hosts your webspace. Where it says username replace that with your Wharton username.

Making changes to your home page

If you need to make major changes to your homepage, you may want to use an html editor. For some helpful tips, guides and tutorials about HTML, one resource that people have found helpful is the "HTML Basics" guides on the Web Monkey website.

For minor changes like correcting spelling errors or modifying existing text, you can use PICO, a text editor available on our UNIX host systems.

Edit your documents without an HTML Editor:

If you do not have an HTML editor, you can use the PICO text editor available on our UNIX host systems. To do that, follow the directions below:

• Connect to your host system.
• Type the following to edit your homepage file: pico public_html/index.html
• Make the desired changes using HTML. For guides and tutorials about HTML, refer to the "HTML Basics" guides on the Web Monkey website.
• When you are finished making changes, press x while holding the CTRL key, then press y, then press the Enter key.
• Type the following: logout
• Use your browser to go to your homepage.
• Click the Reload/Refresh button to see the changes.

Students Web Server Capabilities

The Students web server allows basic web capabilites for it's pages. There are a few processes that are allowed on the server. These include:

• Forms: There is a CGI form on the Students server that will allow you to obtain information from your webpage visitors. For information on CGI form processing, see:
  CGI Form Processing.
• Server Side Executions (SSI): The Students server allows for most server side executions. However, it does not allow executing commands or < exec > tags. If you decide to use SSI, please note that the file you create must end in .shtml for it to be recognized by the server.
  For a tutorial on how to use SSI, please see: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/howto/ssi.html

Please keep in mind that the Students web server is a shared resource. For that reason, the web capabilities are limited. The two processes listed above are allowed on the server, however most other processes are not supported. Some of the processes that are not supported include ASP, PHP and SQL. If you find that you do need these resources for your website, you will need to find another web server host.