Conn McCarthy - Tutorials

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Maths department website tutorial

Anyone who has an account on the maths department servers in TCD also has a personal website automatically created for them. Your website URL will take the form "maths.tcd.ie/~username", where "username" is your - you guessed it - username for the maths department servers. If you haven't set up your website, the URL will return a 403 error (Access Forbidden). To my knowledge, there is no comprehensive tutorial or set of instructions for setting up this website. The closest thing to a tutorial that I could find was this page, which doesn't explain the whole process.

In previous years, some students have used their websites as a great resource to share notes, keep a blog about their attempts to grow a pineapple, or even show off whatever this is... Unfortunately, I have noticed that not as many students have been taking full advantage of their websites, or do not even know that they have one.

So here is my attempt to provide such a tutorial, and hopefully this will result in more students creating websites. It's a great way to procrastinate while still feeling productive. Let's see you do that, Netflix.

Instructions:

  1. Log in to the maths department servers through one of the terminals in the maths department, or through remote access using ssh*. Create a folder in your home folder and name it "www".
    * ssh is a program ( strictly speaking, a cryptographic network protocol) that allows you to access the maths department server from any computer connected to the internet, all you need is the IP address of the department website.You can download PuTTY, a program that allows you to use ssh, here.

  2. Create an html file named "index.html" and put it in your www folder. This file will be the page that is seen when you enter the URL "maths.tcd.ie/~username". Tell the world who you are, or just or just post Star Trek, if that's your prerogative.
    Feel free to make other pages in your www folder. It generally helps to have a link to these additional pages on your homepage, otherwise people can't see that page without knowing the exact URL of the page.

  3. Now, you need to change the permissions of the www folder and any pages that you have made. To do this, go to the terminal and type "chmod 755 www"**, then press enter. This will allow anyone on the internet to read files inside www. In addition, you must type "chmod 644 name.html" for any file*** that you want people to read. Make sure that your working directory in the terminal is www when you do this.
    ** The command chmod, and a list of many other bash commands, are explained here.
    *** If you have a rather large amount of files that need their permissions all changed to the same state, you can use a wildcard, which is explained here.

  4. Go to the URL of your homepage to make sure that your page looks the way you want it to, and that you set the permissions correctly.

All good things...

If, after all that effort, you decide that you don't actually want a website (BOO-URNS!), then you can simply change the permissions on the www folder, or delete the whole folder entirely.
If you're wondering why I didn't go through any html basics, the answer is right in front of you. I'll provide links below to some websites that I found helpful while learning html...
That's about it. Hopefully I was clear enough.

Useful resources

Here are some links that might be helpful to you when creating your website...: