Table of Contents

Building a website on SDF

Contents


Introduction

Creating your own websites can be fun and SDF gives webspace to all its validated users, so the moment you become validated you can begin creating your own websites straight away.

In this tutorial when text looks like this this means it's a command you can run in your shell, once you've logged into SDF.

Getting Started

Your First Page!

Creating your first page is SO easy! First you'll need to open a text editor. SDF has many text editors installed but new users to UNIX often find that “nano” is the easiest to work with.

  <html><head>;
    <title>My First Page!</title>
  </head><body>
    <h1>My First Page!</h1>
    <p>This is my first html web page!</p>
  </body></html>
  

Now that you have copied the text out into 'nano', you need to save the file. To do this, hold down the 'CTRL' key on your keyboard and whilst pressing that, press the letter 'o'.
Right, now, do you remember that URL you selected when you ran mkhomepg? Open a web browser and type that into the address bar. Hopefully, after a few seconds. You should see your very own web page!

Problems

The most important thing you need to have is patience. Sometimes updates when running mkhomepg may take a few hours to complete, sometimes they will occur almost immediately. By using the higher functions of your brain and patience you will solve a lot of the problems you may meet!

In case a page is not found on your site, the client may be forwarded to a page of sdf.lonestar.org or redmartian, which can be confusing (but which is in fact completely reasonable, as all the domains belong to one entity). If you want to prevent this also for broken links, you have to set up error handler documents. Please consult the FAQ item for this!

$Id: building_a_website.html,v 1.6 2007/08/21 19:16:46 yargo Exp $