Technology Workshop:
For Teaching and Professional Life

The following resources and exercises will get you up to speed with creating and posting your own web pages to your university account (sobek, ucsu, spot, etc). Though not a comprehensive presentation of EVERYTHING you will need to know, the following items will guide you through the steps necessary to post items on the web.

Step 1:

Preparing your HTML directory: Complete the steps for items 1 (for ucsu, ucsub account holders) or 2 (for sobek, spot, or other university servers) after clicking on the following link. This will set up the public_html directory/ folder in your university account. This will be the place where you will store all of your public documents (web pages/ html files, pdf files, etc.). Without creating this directory, you will have no space to place your public files!!!

http://www.colorado.edu/its/docs/web/creation/index.html

Step 2:

Creating Web Documents: Read through item 3 from the link above. This will guide you through the basics of html and whizzywig (WYSIWYG- what you see is what you get) page construction. Html is a computer language used to tell web browsers like Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator how to display your web page.

When building your page, you can write the html code manually (big pain in the rear), or you can use a whizzywig which writes the code for you. Using a WYSIWYG will allow you to use an interface similar to MS word or Word Perfect to create relatively simple web pages(though it helps to understand some basics of html to tweak your pages or to fix glitches in the code).

Try it out: Using Netscape Navigator, look under the "tools" or "tasks" pull down menu bar and find the "composer" funtion (or you could open a WYSIWYG like MS Front Page, or Dreamweaver). It will open an interface similar to MS Word. Play around with it. Write in some text. Change the color of the text. The font. The size. The style. Change the background colors using the "page colors and properties" funtion under one of the "formating" pulldown menus. Try to create a link by using the "create hyperlink" function. Try to put in an image from disc or on your hard drive. Arrange your text using the "tables" function.

Once you save this page, and use a file transfer program (see step 3), you can place this in your public_html directory (which you just created in step 1), and people will be able to access your file!!

Step 3:

When using a WYSIWYG editor or writing you own html code, you are creating/editing Web page files (usually with a .html or .htm tag at the end of the file name) and then saving them on your local hard drive. At this point, the world does not have access to these files (which may be a good thing).

For the world to see your awesome, creative work, you must move those files to your public_html directory so the world can see them. This process involves learning how to use Fetch v4.02 (Macintosh) or SSH Secure File Transfer (PC) which you can download to your local machine from the following site:

http://www.colorado.edu/its/security/encauth/telnet/

Next, read the following instruction on how to use these programs:

http://www.colorado.edu/its/docs/web/creation/upload.html

Step 4:

How do i view my homepage and where should i direct others to look? Once you have saved and transfered your page using SSH or Fetch, you can view your Web page by typing in the URL in the Location bar (Netscape) or in the Address bar (Internet Explorer). The URL for your Web page will be http://machine.colorado.edu/~username/Home.html. For example, if you have an account on ucsub and your login name is smithdj, your URL would be: http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~smithdj/Home.html

Note: when saving your *main homepage* in the WYSIWYG- save file as Home.html or index.html (depending on your particular server- im not certain which filenames apply to which server). this allows the university system that you do indeed have a home page.

Any file you create and save to your public_html directory will be accessible using the following URL format: http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~smithdj/filename.html

If you have a large number of files you wish to create for your website, you can create new sub-directories or sub-folders inside your public_html directory. For example, if you invision having a teaching page, a research page, a publications page, and a personal page, it may make sense to create separate directories called teaching, research, publications, etc.

When you create a new directory, and save a file in this directory, the URL to access this file will be as follows: http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~smithdj/NewDirectoryName/newfilename.html