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Creating a Web Home Page (VMS)
 | Which Web Server to Use |
| How to Create a Simple World Wide Web Home Page | |
| Making Your Home Page More Sophisticated |
| Using the FastTrack Server |
| More About HTML |
| HTML Conversion Utilities |
| Web Usage Statistics |
Which Web Server to Use [Back to Top]
To make a document available to users of the World Wide Web, it must be accessible to a Web server. The Computing Center staff strongly recommends that you use the servers that run on DARKWING or GLADSTONE, even though there are other Web servers on campus. The instructions in this handout tell how to create and maintain a home page while logged in on OREGON, for those who prefer working in the VMS environment.
A note on constructing URLs in the VMS environment: Be sure to use www-vms in your URLs instead of oregon (e.g., use "http://www-vms.uoregon.edu" instead of "http://oregon.uoregon.edu") when creating a home page under the [.www] directory. (Note that the URL syntax differs for the VMScluster's FastTrack server. See Using the FastTrack Server for more information.)
If you are interested in using another of the UO's Web servers, you can view a list of them at URL http://darkwing/~joe/uo-www-servers.html
How to Create a Simple World Wide Web Home Page [Back to Top]
- Your home page should reside in a directory called www, under
your main directory. To create this directory, type
- $ create/dir [.www]
- Everyone should have read and execute access to your www directory. To grant this access, type
- $ set prot=w:re www.dir
- Then, move to this directory by typing
- $ set def [.www]
- Create a file called index.html using your usual VMS editor (EVE or EDT):
- $ eve index.html
- When you create a Web page, you add HyperText Markup
Language (HTML) "tags" to the file to format it for display. The sequence below shows you how to create a simple home page, using some basic HTML tags:
<HTML> (all Web documents begin with this tag)
<TITLE>Bob's Home Page</TITLE> (identify your own home page here)
<H1>Bob's Home Page</H1> (the title is often duplicated as the first heading)
Welcome to my Home Page! (here is the first text line on the page)
<P> (begin a new paragraph)
I will be adding information to this page. . . (the first line of text in the next paragraph)
</HTML> (all Web documents end with this tag)
- Save the file by typing a Ctrl/Z (type exit if you're using EDT).
- Make sure others are able to read your home page file by typing
- $ set prot=w:re index.html
- Ask a friend to text-view your home page at
http://www-vms.uoregon.edu/~username (replace username with your VMS username).
Making Your Home Page More Sophisticated [Back to Top]
Once you have a simple home page, you'll probably want to make it more sophisticated. For example, you might want to add links from your home page to other Web sites. Let's say, for example, that you'd like to add a reference to a Web site, http://foo.bar.edu/neato.html. You'd simply add a line like this to your index.html file for each link:
This line creates a link between your home page and the above resource, with The Foo Neato Page showing up as a selectable item on your home page. The actual URL of this resource gets hidden from the viewers of your page.
Images: To add a link to a digitized image, simply create a link to its URL, using the special IMG SRC tag. The only critical issue is to make sure that the image ends in a proper extension (.gif for gif files, .jpg or .jpeg for jpeg files, etc.):
Lists: You can also make a list of selectable items, using the unnumbered list (UL), list item (LI), and break (BR) tags:
-
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="http://foo.bar.edu/neato.html"> The Foo Neato Page </A>
<BR>
<LI><A HREF="http://whizzo.gov/frogdata.html"> The Whizzo Frog Data </A>
</UL>
Verbatim Text: To include verbatim text (such as program listings, etc.) exactly the way it currently exists, use HTML's preformatted text tag, PRE:
<PRE>
main ()
{
printf(Hello, world!\n");
}
</PRE>
Note that "less-than" symbols (<) , "greater-than" symbols (>), and ampersands (&) must be specially represented to insure that they appear as actual symbols, rather than getting interpreted as HTML tags, even if they're enclosed in a <PRE>...</PRE> block. (Use < > and & in place of these three symbols. Make sure you include the semi-colons!)
Using the FastTrack Server [Back to Top]
A second Web server known as "FastTrack" now runs on the VMScluster. Using FastTrack enables you to transmit your web pages to the remote web browser in an encrypted/secure form. If you wish to use this server, you will need to create your web page in a directory called [.public_html] and use a different URL address, beginning with "https://" (note the trailing "s" in "http"). If you create pages under [.public_html] instead of under [.www], use the address syntax
- https://web-vms.uoregon.edu/~username
- instead of
- https://www-vms.uoregon.edu/~username
More About HTML [Back to Top]
There is a lot more you can do in HTML than we've covered here. For a good introduction to writing HTML, see
http://cc.uoregon.edu/webdev.html (Observe capitalization!)
HTML Conversion Utilities [Back to Top]
Although you can write HTML perfectly well "by hand", you may find that it is more efficient (or at least more fun) to use whatever word processor you are currently accustomed to using instead. There are a number of conversion utilities available to add HTML tags to documents created by common word processors (Word, WordPerfect, Framemaker, TeX, LaTeX, etc.). The quality of such conversions may vary, but in general most users seem pleased with this alternative to writing HTML by hand.
To view a list of HTML conversion utilities, go to
http://www.w3.org/Tools/ (Observe capitalization!)
Web Usage Statistics [Back to Top]
To view statistics on who has been browsing pages in www.uoregon.edu, see
http://www.uoregon.edu/monthly-log.html
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