Publishing your Web Pages
J. Young

What do we mean by publish?

When talking about web pages, the word publish is somewhat of a misnomer.  In the traditional sense, publishing usually refers to having a publishing organization (publishing company, magazine, etc) look at one's work and decide that it is worthy of their standards to invest the time and money to make it available to the general public.   However with web pages, anyone can make their pages available to the general public (the entire world, in fact) by publishing or posting their web pages.

Technically, when we publish or post our web pages, we are moving them to a computer that acts as a web server.  Usually, the web server is set up with specific defaults and requirements so that you have to move them to a particular directory or directory tree.  The web server makes our pages available to the rest of the internet (through something called the httpd protocol).  Our pages now become part of the world wide web!

So how do we Publish our Web Pages?

There are a number of options for publishing our web pages.

• Through your ISP.  Some (not all) ISPs provide methods for publishing web pages (e.g. AOL provides 2MB of web space for each screen name).   Check with your ISP for specifics.
• A free web page service.  For example, geocities.com provides free space to publsih web pages.  Go to geocities.com to create an account or for more details.  Also, there are several other sites that provide the same type of service.   Most will add advertising to your page, however, which could be quite annoying, as well as increase download times.
• A web hosting company.  Web hosting companies charge you a monthly fee for disk space and other services to publish your web pages.  Usually, the minimum charge for these companies is about $20/month.  For small businesses that want a web presence (and who doesn't these days?), this is a good alternative.  Many also provide domain registration services, so that you can get your own special .com address.
• The SCSU web server, home.southernct.edu.  This is highly recommended for members of these courses, as it has been set up to make publishing your web pages relatively easy to do.  For more information on using this server, check below.

All students and faculty can publish their web pages on the web server called home.southernct.edu.  All faculty and students are automatically given an account to do this, similar to the MySCSU account that you are given for email and the campus portal.  In fact, your username and password to publish your web pages are the same as your MySCSU account!  If you have never used your MySCSU account and you do not know what your MySCSU username or password are, then you will have to log into Banner Web to get this information.  Instructions on how to do this are available on the SCSU Help Desk website.  FYI, If you know your MySCSU username, your password is the same as your Banner Web PIN.

To publish web documents using your MySCSU account on home.southernct.edu:

• Use the FTP program of your choice and connect to home.southernct.edu.  Use your username and password to connect. (Do NOT try to use anonymous.)
• Set the directory on the remote host side (home.southernct.edu) to /www (in WS-FTP, it will show up as the www folder).
• Upload your files (html and corresponding graphic and/or multimedia) to your /www directory
  • Make sure that your HTML files are sent in ASCII mode.
  • Graphics and other multimedia files must be sent in BINARY mode.
• The URL of your webpage is:http://home.southernct.edu/~username/documentname
  • where username is your UNIX account name (don't forget the tilde)
  • documentname is the the filename.ext of your HTML file (if your site has multiple pages, the top or root level page should be referenced here)
  • Note. If your top level HTML document is called index.html, you do not need to add the document name to the URL.
  • ** Note  Make sure your files have valid extensions that your browser will recognize, e.g.
    • .html, htm - html files
    • .gif - gif files
    • .jpg - jpeg files

A "web viewlet" is available to help guide you through this process.  Please follow all regulations and CSU student use policies with regard to any pages published!

Copyright © 1999-2002, John O. Young Jr.