A Homepage of One s Own

By Doug Bateman, CWIS Coordinator (dbateman@unt.edu)

This is a slightly edited version of a News From the CWIS/Gopher Hole column that appeared in the July/August 1995 issue of Benchmarks (Vol. 16, No. 4).

I suppose that, for the majority of you reading this, the most important news to come out of my area in the past several months is the opening up of the UNT World Wide Web to serving personal homepages. If you haven t heard about it before now, I m very surprised. Yes, anyone who has an active account on Jove (our general-purpose UNIX host system) can now publish on the Web. Before I go into the details of how to do this, let me first lay out some of the ground rules.

Rules of the Road

Now before you go off saying to yourself, Oh no, I knew there had to be catch! , I want to assure everyone that as much concern and thought was put into this process as was humanly possible. At no time was any consideration given to making this opportunity restrictive by nature quite the opposite as a matter of fact. Every attempt has been made to allow everyone the freedom to express his/her own individuality and creativity. Also, please make a note that there has been no attempt to single out student homepages any reference to personal or individual web pages is without regard to that person's status with the University.

The end result is that instead of me or the Computing Center or whoever coming up with new rules, regulations, etc. to govern the content of personal web pages, existing University policies and regulations regarding the printing or public dissemination or display of materials will be extended to cover individual web pages. Of course, policies that govern use of University computing resources naturally apply here as well.

I won t use this column to quote all the pertinent policies or regulations since they are freely available and many are included in either the student or employee handbooks we ve all received or the graduate and undergraduate catalogs. Some of the more obvious violations would include: displaying images that fall under UNT's sexual harassment policies; advertising or promoting a for-profit businesses; and anything that promotes, espouses, or encourages discrimination in the areas defined by University policy.

Let me add that neither I nor anyone that I work with has any intention of playing Web cop to enforce any of these policies or regulations. UNT already has in place adequate grievance procedures that can be used by anyone who takes issue with anything published or displayed on campus, no matter what form the material may take. So, what should you do if you should happen upon a web page (published at UNT by someone affiliated with the University) that you consider objectionable?

Your first action should be to contact the author of the web page to express your concerns directly. You d be amazed at how unintentional some offenses are, and how cooperative people can be when their offense is called to their attention. If you are reluctant or unable to do this, or you have tried this without success, I offer myself as a mediator of sorts. You can contact me by phoning (817)565-2568, E-mail me at www@unt.edu, or drop by my office at Room 119, Information Sciences Building (ISB). I will discuss the matter with you, privately and confidentially, and may even attempt to convey your feelings to the individual myself. Ultimately, however, any issues of this nature will be between yourself and the individual concerned, which may involve your following formal grievance procedures.

If you are in the process of creating your own homepage, and have questions about whether something you want to publish may be offensive or objectionable, I would be glad to discuss the matter with you. I certainly do not consider myself the ultimate judge of good taste, but I do feel I can be reasonably objective and nonjudgmental and can provide sensible advice or guidance. Of course, you d certainly be free to regard or disregard my advice as you saw fit.

How to Start

The following instructions are basically a rehash of the instructions that are available online on Jove. Just enter help at a Jove prompt and follow the menu to recall these instructions while you are online.

In your home directory, create a subdirectory named www. Note: this directory must be named www.
% cd ENTER
% mkdir www ENTER
Change your current working directory to the www directory you just created. This will be the directory in which you create your homepage and any supporting web pages you want to make.
% cd www ENTER
Create an empty file named index.html. This file will ultimately become your homepage, but even an empty file is necessary in order to prevent a web browser from seeing everything in this directory.
% touch index.html ENTER
Use your favorite text editor to edit the file index.html and create your homepage. That s it!

Guidelines for Personal Web Pages

I've written a web page that contains links to a lot of good material on the Web material that teaches you how to write web pages, provide style guides, etc. You can find this information at http://www.unt.edu/~dbateman/links.html. I also teach a basic web-authoring workshop a few times each semester, one of several Computing Center Short Courses that are available. Here are some additional guidelines, based upon my own experiences:

Keep the use of graphics to the minimum necessary to convey the information you want. A single inline image should not exceed 20-30k in size, and you shouldn t sprinkle images all over your page just because you can. People will quickly grow tired of how long it takes for your page to be displayed in their web browser if you disregard this.
If you do want to use graphics, check out the collection available to everyone at http://www.unt.edu/icons/. No sense using up your Jove disk quota when you can borrow graphics from the server.
Don t use Netscape s non-standard extensions to HTML unless you are deliberately limiting access to your page to only those people who use Netscape. The results displayed in another browser may be hideous!
Be proud of your work sign it. At the very bottom of your page you should put your E-mail address so people can easily send you comments. Depending on the information you are publishing, you might also put the date you last updated the information.
Always keep in mind that the very nature of HTML is that ultimately the web browser determines the appearance of a web page, not the author. Don t try to force HTML to do what you think it ought to; the end results (to the person viewing your page) are usually not worth the effort.
Do use this opportunity to tell the world a little about yourself. Include your likes and dislikes. Include your interests and hobbies. If you have collected a lot of information about a particular interest of yours, be sure to include it. And let people know about your homepage. There are a number of sites, newsgroups, etc. that encourage individuals to announce their homepages.
For those of you who want to be on the cutting edge of web- authoring, I m afraid you may find UNT s WWW site somewhat restrictive. Imagemaps are now supported but server-side includes and locally executable CGI scripts are not available due to security concerns. Unfortunately, this means that HTML forms are not generally available since each form usually requires its own CGI script to process the form data. I will attempt to make generic CGI scripts available that those of you who wish to may use.
As always, I am available for any questions, suggestions, or comments you may have. I hope that you make use of this opportunity and that it proves useful for you in some way. But most of all: Enjoy it!

To report any problems or questions about this server please contact us by sending mail to www@unt.edu. Thanks!