HTML

The biggest part of your work is to make the HTML files. Don't worry, it's not very difficult.

To do a simple text home page with some hypterext links is almost as easy as writing a plain text document.

HTML stands for hypertext markup language, the file format used by the WWW. To learn HTML, you can start by reading any of the HTML primers available on the Web. Our TechTalk HTML Reference has links to lots of great tools to help you get started.

FTP to PRIMUS

If your HTML documents and supporting graphics are on your home computer or another UNIX machine, you can use use an FTP client of your choice to transfer them to your account here on PRIMUS.

All FTP software should allow you to take the following generic steps. The user interface will vary:

• Open a connection to shell.primushost.com; enter your username and password.
• Once you're authenticated, you will see the contents of your home directory. Find the subdirectory called "public_html". Virtual host owners might see two directories, depending on what machine your virtual host is on: "public_html" and "virtual_html". By default they will both go to the vhost directory, but can be separated into two different sites upon request.
• Enter the "public_html" directory and upload your documents there. HTML files and cgi scripts written in perl or sh must be uploaded as ascii, where graphic files must be transfered in binary mode or as raw data to prevent corruption during transfer.
• Create any subdirectories you may need to reflect the architecture of your web pages. For example: images could be collected in a subdirectory called "images" for your homepage setup.

Access Your Files on the Web

The URL to access your WWW pages is: http://users.primushost.com/~username/file.html (Username is your login name and file.html is the WWW document).

Please Note:

• The server is setup to recognize files with the .html and .htm extensions as HTML documents.
• UNIX is case sensitive.The files welcome.html, Welcome.html and WELCOME.html are all unique.
• The directory /img at the root level of a virtual host (www.company.com/img)
  has special meaning for the CERN web server. "/img" is an alias for the imagemap script and a root level directory named /img will not be accessed.
• It is recommended that the main page to your site have one of the following names:
  • welcome.html
  • welcome.htm
  • Welcome.html
  • index.html
  • index.htm

If no HTML document is specified in the URL the server will search for the above files as the default document. This is alo true for any subdirectories you may have on your web site as well as for virtual hosts. For example: http://users.primushost.com/~username/ will bring up the document welcome.html. If the server cannot find any of the above files, an error message is given.

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