How to set up your home page

Your home page should be in (or, indeed, is) a sub-directory called www in your home directory. The directory tree under www will be the place where you store whatever documents you want to make accessible to browsers on Mosaic. When the server gets a request for ~user, it looks in the user's home directory for a subdirectory called www. If there is a file called index.html in that directory, the server displays index.html, otherwise it will make a list of all files in the www directory and display that. The index.html file is an html document that serves as an index of things in your www directory. You can have an index.html file for each sub-directory too.

To control access to the files in the www directory, you should create a file called .htaccess in the www directory. You can also have a .htaccess file in each subdirectory under www, to control access to that directory. The .htaccess file contains directives that determine who can or cannot access your files. For information on what directives to use in your .htaccess file, click here. You can also have more sophisticated authentication procedures for controlling access to your documents, such as password based authentication. For a tutorial on this, click here.

For example, to access the home page of a user called pele from Mosaic, from the Mosaic file menu, open the URL http://george.ee.washington.edu/~pele. The server george.ee.washington.edu then looks in the directory ~pele/www. It first checks the ~pele/www/.htaccess file to see if the person making the request from Mosaic is an authorised user. If so, it looks for a file called index.html, it reads that as an HTML document. Otherwise it prepares a list of all files in that directory and displays it.

For more detailed information on HTML, click here .