Creating Personal Websites

At Columbia, everyone with a CUIT UNIX account can place documents in their account space and make them available through the web. Use of your computer account in this way is dependent on your reading and understanding University policies and guidelines, including the Computer Accounts & Policies.

Columbia University does not sponsor, review or monitor the contents of the personal home pages of its faculty, students or staff on websites using University facilities, nor does the University endorse the contents of any such personal home pages.

• Departments and student organizations can create official web pages in the Columbia domain by requesting server space for an official website. If you are creating an official website, you must be assigned a directory outside of your personal account. Please see the instructions for creating an official site at Columbia.

To create your personal homepage you need to do three things:

• Create a world-accessible directory called public_html within your CUIT UNIX account. You may already have this directory.
• Create HTML documents in your CUIT UNIX account or on your computer.
• Move all files into your public_html directory and make them public on the Internet.

Creating Your Public Directory

Create the directory and set the protection so that it is public. To do this, you must telnet to your CUIT UNIX account and type three commands (skip the second if you already have a public_html directory):

Creating Your HTML documents

Your personal home page would normally be called index.html. That will make it the default file that is shown to a visitor to your site. The file called index.html is your home page, the starting point for access to your web pages.

The address, or URL (Uniform Resource Locator), used to reach:

would be:

To access the other web pages in your directory, the visitor to your site would have to follow a link from your home page, or type the complete URL including the file name:

http://www.columbia.edu/~user/filename.html

Moving Your Files & Making Them Public

If you need to move files from your computer into your public_html directory please see our instructions for using FTP. If your files are in the proper place on the server already, please see our instructions for managing access and setting permissions so that your files are public.