New Web Page Guide

In order for members of the department to obtain web space on the Math Department's WWW server you must first send an email to the system administrators (just send an email to requests on coxeter). A WWW account will be opened for you and a directory called www-data will be created inside your coxeter home directory. You will be sent an email informing you of this plus the following instructions:

You now have a web account.

    You can run "cd ~/www-data" on coxeter to get to the directory
    containing your web pages.  If you "publish your web pages" (that is,
    create the pages on a different machine and transfer them to coxeter) 
    then you need to publish them to coxeter.math.toronto.edu into that
    directory.
   
    If you edit your web pages on coxeter remember that you usually have to
    run "chmod -R a+rX ~/www-data" or the more mnemonic "openmywebfiles" to
    open up all the files in your web directory for general access.
    WARNING: If you have course webpages and you keep confidential items
    like exam tex files and course mark excel files in the relevant course
    subdirectory, these files will become READABLE.  Please be careful!
    Also if you use htaccess files to control access to your webpages then
    those files will become readable as well.  The default on coxeter is to
    not give others access to your files.  You can open individual files
    and directories for access with "chmod a+rX filename", for example.

    Your webpage is at:

         http://www.math.toronto.edu/<your_login_name>/

    where the string "<your_login_name>" is replaced with your coxeter
    login name.

    If you are updating your web pages remember that you usually need to
    use the "Reload" or "Refresh" button in your browser to see the
    changes or else you will get the old cached version of the pages
    which makes it look like the changes have not taken effect.

    Note that if you use "htaccess" files then you need to run
    "chmod o-rwx .htusers" on all your .htusers files if you ever open
    up all you files (you can ignore this if you don't use such
    files).

There is a sample "index.html" in your "www-data" directory. Please
send your web requests to the webmaster (webmaster@math.toronto.edu).

You should now be able to put files and directories inside the www-data directory which will be available via the web (just make sure that the permissions are correctly set, as explained above).

For a guide on how to start making your own web pages please refer to this Introduction to HTML (external link).

PHP is also enabled, although we cannot provide support for any PHP scripting. Please refer to www.php.net (external link) for reference.

[Last update: May 9, 2007]