Skip navigation

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES

Making a quick home page - Mac

Overview

If you have a SUNet ID and a Stanford Unix account, then you've probably got a pre-configured, ready to use WWW folder in your home directory. All you want to do now is put up a home page fast. (If you need to create a web page somewhere else, take a look at the Creating a WWW directory page.) This page tells you how to create a fast home page on a Macintosh using Stanford Open AFS, which is available to the Stanford community fee-of-charge.

Go to your WWW folder

Put your AFS home folder onto your desktop

  1. Click and hold the Stanford Desktop Tools icon Stanford Desktop Tools icon to display a popup menu. Click Mount AFS Volume.
    (Alternatively, from your Applications folder click Stanford, click AFS, and double-click AFS Controller.)
  2. When the Mount AFS Volume window opens, under "Mount volume belonging to," click My Home and then click Mount. If you need help doing this, see Using Stanford OpenAFS for Macintosh.
  3. A window will open on your desktop. Inside this window are your WWW files and folders: you are now in AFS. Double-click the WWW folder to open it.

Create your home page

Open TextEdit

  1. Double click the TextEdit icon. (It's in the Applications folder.)
  2. Close the window called "Untitled.txt".
  3. Go to the TextEdit menu and select Preferences ... .
  4. Click the Plain text button in the New Document panel of the Preferences dialog box.
  5. Close the Preferences dialog box.
  6. Go to the File menu and click New.

Place the quick template inside

  1. In the new TextEdit window on your screen you can type out the characters shown in the little HTML template below, or simply copy the whole thing and paste it into your TextEdit document. 

    <html>
<head>
<title>Your Name's Sample Home Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h3>Put your name here.</h3>
<p>
Put text about yourself here.</p>
<p>
Put more text about yourself here.</p>
</body>
</html>
  2. Edit the template as necessary, adding your own name where it says "Put your name here", etc.

Save the TextEdit document

  1. Go to the File menu.
  2. Click Save.
  3. In the Save as field, type index.html.
  4. In the Where drop down menu, select Desktop.
  5. Make sure the Plain Text Encoding field says Western (Mac OS Roman).
  6. Click Save.
  7. Close the TextEdit document (which is now titled index.html).

Put your new home page onto the Web

Your home page is ready to go. Find the index.html file on your desktop and drag it into the WWW folder that you opened using Stanford OpenAFS. Leave the WWW folder open until after you've checked your work and are satisfied with what you've done.

Check your work

At this point you're ready to take a look at the web page you just created. Go to http://www.stanford.edu/~yoursunetid. (Substitute "yoursunetid" with your actual SUNet ID but leave the tilde character ~ before your account name.) Your new home page should be visible right away. If there are things you'd like to change you can open TextEdit and use it to revise your index.html file, dragging and dropping the file anew each time you want to put your latest version up on the Web. If the page is not visible you may need help figuring out what's wrong. Please send a HelpSU request and describe the situation.

What next?

You'll probably want to add more information, edit the page, add more pages, etc. Poke around the Learning HTML pages and File transfer site for more information about how to do these things.

Last modified Monday, 21-Apr-2008 09:29:11 AM

Stanford University Home Page