You must have an account at the UGCS cluster to maintain a home page here. Otherwise, you're on your own; if you create a home page elsewhere, you can still link it into our Personal Home Pages list if you can convince someone to make a file in a directory in /ug/drop/homepages (see below). To get an account at the UGCS cluster, fill out an account request form, available in the doorway of the lab (166 Jorgensen). You must be a Caltech student, faculty or staff member.
First, you must become familiar with HTML documents, URLs and the Web in general. Once you think you can write valid HTML, here's the site-specific stuff you need to know to serve it to the world.
We run the Apache httpd server on www.ugcs.caltech.edu. It has access to the filesystem as user www. Under /home/www are its configuration files and some documents (including the file you're reading now).
The server serves URLs of the form http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~user/path from files located in /home/user/www/data/path. The "user" can be anyone on the system. Thus, to create world-accessable documents, make a www/data subdirectory in your home directory and put them there. The URL http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~user/, without any further path, refers to /home/user/www/data/index.html. This is typically your "home page".
You can create these documents and use the Open Location... feature of Netscape to test them.
When you've finally made a home page that looks good, you can add it to the UGCS page of Personal Home Pages by creating a file that contains your URL in the appropriate directory in /ug/drop/homepages.
For example, if you wish your homepage to appear in the Students section of our list, you could do something like this...
% cd /ug/drop/homepages... and your link should appear in our list shortly. Have fun!
% cd "1 Students"
% echo "http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~joeuser/" > "Joe Clueless"