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Creating your Personal Web Page

Activate your OAK Account:

Like most other network services on campus, your personal web pages are tied to your Oak account. If you haven't yet activated your Oak account, you will need to do so before you can publish any personal web pages. Click here to learn how to activate your account.

Enable your Web Sites:

Once your Oak account is active, you will need to enable your web site(s).

Oak allows you to have two different personal web sites: a public site, and a password-protected site. Your public site is available to anyone with a web browser, anywhere on the Internet, while your password-protected site is available only to users with a valid Oak ID and password*.

Your public and password-protected sites are independent of one another and can be enabled/disabled separately. To enable/disable either of your web sites, visit our Easy Oak Web Page Setup page.

*Once it is enabled, you can further restrict access to your password-protected site by compiling a list of Oak IDs and uploading that list to your Oak account. See Restricting Access for more information on this feature.

Create your Pages:

Web sites consist of text files written in a simple computer language called HTML, plus subsidiary content files like graphics, sound files, etc. Basic HTML is very easy to learn, and a number of great tutorials are available free over the Internet. The Computer Services Center also offers free classes in HTML.

Once you understand the basics of HTML, you can use any text editor or word processor to create your pages. Dedicated HTML editing packages also can be used to write HTML code. Some of these packages don't even require you to know a thing about HTML! See HTML Reference for some useful links to tutorials and editing packages.

Oak-specific web page requirements:

  1. All HTML file names need to end with .html for the Oak system to recognize them as web pages.
  2. index.html is the default file that Oak searches for when a URL doesn't include a specific file name. If index.html doesn't exist in the appropriate folder, Oak simply returns a list of all files in that folder. You should name your home page "index.html" and make sure it is located in your main web folder. If you decide to create subfolders on your website, you can (and should) create an index.html file for each subfolder as well.
  3. File names on Oak are case sensitive. Unless you have good reason to do otherwise, stick to lower case. For example, Oak treats resume.html, Resume.html, and RESUME.HTML as three separate files.
  4. All Oak web pages must conform to the University's Computer and Network Use policy. Pay special attention to section II of this policy!

Upload your Files:

After you create your web pages, you will need to upload them and any subsidiary content files to the appropriate folder(s) on your Oak account.

WebDAV Home Page Uploads and Maintenance:

  1. Open your Oak storage space (instructions here).
  2. Open the appropriate main web folder:
    • public_html for your public web site
    • public_shtml for your password-protected site
    • If you can't find the appropriate folder, make sure you have enabled your web site(s) correctly.
  3. You now can create subfolders and drag, drop and edit files in your web folder just like you would in a normal folder window.
  4. When finished, be sure to close your browser.
  5. View your new pages.

Basic Home Page Upload via Secure FTP (alternate method):

  1. Using a Secure FTP client, open a connection to oak.cats.ohiou.edu.
  2. Open the appropriate main web folder:
    • public_html for your public web site
    • public_shtml for your password-protected site
    • If you can't find the appropriate folder, make sure you have enabled your web site(s) correctly.
  3. Set your Secure FTP client to ASCII mode and upload index.html and any other HTML files that belong in this folder.
  4. Change your Secure FTP client to Binary mode and upload any image/sound/etc. files that belong in this folder.
  5. Close your Secure FTP connection.
  6. View your new pages.

Creating Subfolders via Secure FTP (alternate method):

  1. Using a Secure FTP client, open a connection to oak.cats.ohiou.edu.
  2. Open the appropriate main web folder:
    • public_html for your public web site
    • public_shtml for your password-protected site
    • If you can't find the appropriate folder, make sure you have enabled your web site(s) correctly.
  3. To create a subfolder, first make sure you are in the correct main folder. Then use your Secure FTP client to create and name your new subfolder.
  4. Open the new subfolder.
  5. Set your Secure FTP client to ASCII mode and upload index.html and any other HTML files that belong in this folder. (Remember, each web folder on Oak can have a file called "index.html" that contains that folder's default page.)
  6. Change your Secure FTP client to Binary mode and upload any image/sound/etc. files that belong in this folder.
  7. Close your Secure FTP connection.
  8. View your new pages.

Managing and Updating Existing Files and Folders via Secure FTP (alternate method):

To update an existing file on your Oak web space, edit a copy of that file on your personal computer, then use your Secure FTP client to upload the edited file to Oak. If you don't have a local copy of the file in question, you can always connect via Secure FTP and download the file to your computer. You then can edit that copy and upload it after saving your changes. Remember to use ASCII mode whenever you upload or download an HTML file, and Binary mode for most other files.

To delete a file from your Oak web space, connect to Oak with your Secure FTP client, navigate to the appropriate folder, and use your Secure FTP client's Delete feature to remove the file in question. To rename a file or folder on your Oak web space, use your Secure FTP client's Rename feature.

Your URL:

Once you have created and uploaded your web pages, you'll need to know the correct URLs to view those pages. The basic URLs are:

Public Site: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~oakid

Password Protected Site: https://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~oakid

* Replace oakid with your actual Oak ID.

If you have any subfolders on your site(s), their pages can be viewed by adding the folder name to the appropriate basic URL from above. For example, if you have a folder in public_html called "pictures", the URL for that folder would be:

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~oakid/pictures

If you also have a folder inside "pictures" called "lab", that folder's URL would be:

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~oakid/pictures/lab

Your Web Quota:

Your Oak account comes with 200 megabytes (500 for faculty and staff) of personal web storage space. This space is separate from your e-mail quota. Files in your personal web folders do not affect your e-mail storage, and vice versa.

When you near your limit, the Oak system automatically will send warning messages to your Oak e-mail address. Once you reach your limit, you will be unable to upload any additional files to your web folders.

If you would like to request a higher quota, please send that request via e-mail to oak.support@ohio.edu. Quota increase requests are considered on a case-by-case basis.

Restricting Access:

By default, your password-protected web pages are accessible to anyone with a valid Oak ID and password. You can further restrict access to specific folders within your password-protected site (or the entire site) by creating access lists. To do so, use a text editor like Notepad or SimpleText to create a text file named .htaccess with the following line in it:

require user oakid oakid oakid etc

In the line above, replace oakid oakid oakid etc with a list of all of the Oak IDs to which you wish to grant access. Separate the Oak IDs with spaces, and make sure that all of the Oak IDs are on the same line. To achieve the latter, you may have to tell your text editor not to "wrap" text.

When you finish, save* your file and upload it (in ASCII mode) to the appropriate folder on your Oak account.

To restrict access to your entire password-protected site and all of its subfolders, place your .htaccess file in your public_shtml folder. To restrict access just to a specific subfolder and all of the files/folders it contains, place the .htaccess file in that subfolder. To grant access to different parts of your password-protected site to different groups of users, create an .htaccess file for each group of users, and put a copy of the appropriate version in the appropriate folder(s).

*Note for Windows users: Windows will not allow you to save a file whose name starts with a period. To get around this limitation, name your file "htaccess.txt" and use your Secure FTP client's Rename command to change its name to ".htaccess" after uploading it to Oak.

Office of Information Technology
Ohio University
Athens, OH 45701
Service Desk:  (740) 593-1222  or  servicedesk@ohio.edu
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