These instructions only apply to CS Department users' homepages, which reside in the Department's file server and which are served through www.cs.helsinki.fi. The University's general WWW instructions are available from Helpdesk.

Homepages in filesystem and on the Internet

Users' homepages and other pages visible to the outside world are located on the fileserver, under each user's home directory, in a subdirectory named public_html: /home/fs/username/public_html/

The actual homepage should be called index.html: /home/fs/username/public_html/index.html

Personal homepages can be referred to with the following URL schemes:

• http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/Firstname.Surname/
  This is an unambiguous and simple naming scheme and the best way to link to your pages. Firstname.Surname (or Firstname.S.Surname) is the same as your e-mail alias at the CS Department mail server. You can check your alias at  www.cs.helsinki.fi/compfac/user-information (login required).
• http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/~username/
  This is the traditional way to refer to users' homepages. However the tilde (~) is sorta problematic with modern mobile devices.
• http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/username/
  Short and easy to write. This URL scheme is also used in many other places. The previous URL's are redirected to this address.
• http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/people/Firstname.Surname/
  Yet another scheme, similar to that used by the University IT Department.

If you want your homepage listed in the University's personnel directory, you must  use their form (login required; only in Finnish).

Creating a simple homepage

First, under your home directory, create a directory named public_html :
mkdir /home/fs/username/public_html

Then create an index.html file under this directory. You can use an existing page as a template; just save it from your browser, and modify to your liking.

In order for the WWW server to display a homepage, the page and its filesystem path need a certain set of access rights. These can be granted, for example, with the following commands:

chmod a+x . 
chmod a+x public_html 
chmod a+r public_html/* 

More information on HTML:

• The University IT Dept's WWW instructions
• W3C's official homepage of HTML
• Refsnes Data's W3Schools Online Web Tutorials
• One can also learn a lot simply by looking at the source code of existing pages (in most browsers, try View -> Page Source)

The Department's WWW server

The web server used at the Department is Apache. It supports, among other things:

• SSL encryption
• Support for SSI (Server Side Includes, sorta like CSS without the mind bending horror)
• Users can control access to their pages with simple .htaccess rules.
• User CGI scripts cannot be run on www.cs.helsinki.fi for security reasons.

The users' own CGI scripts and other special server-side web software can be run on users.cs.helsinki.fi (instructions).

More information on how to use the webserver:

• Documentation for Apache, the web server used at the Department
• Apache SSL module (mod_ssl) documentation

tietotekniikkaryhma@cs.helsinki.fi