Creating a Homepage

Comcation Web Site customers can create their own WWW
documents and make them available via their Web Site. For
information on how to open a Comcation Web Site, click here.

WWW documents are written in a special format known as HTML
(HyperText Markup Language). One of the easiest ways to learn
about HTML is to look at some examples. If your WWW browser
supports a view source option, you can use it to look at the HTML
source for documents on this and other servers.

To create a home page you need to author an HTML document
named "index.html" and place it in the directory named "public_html" in
your home directory. The "index.html" file is your home page.

An outline of the steps required is given below. Any italicized text
between "[" "]" is a comment and should not be typed.

1. Create "index.html" using your favorite HTML editor.
2. Login into the Comcation network and use FTP or Fetch to do
the following:
(a) Connect to the host "ftp.comcat.com" using your "username"
and "password".
(b) If it does not already exist, create a special subdirectory in
your home directory: "/home/your_user_name/public_html".
(c) Change your directory to the special subdirectory in your
home directory: "/home/your_user_name/public_html".
(d) Upload your "index.html" page into your "public_html"
directory. Make sure you are uploading in text or ASCII format,
but not in binary.
(e) If you used Windows to create your your Web page, this is a
good time to "rename" the file so that the file name will have the
"html" extension.
3. For testing, you can reference your document as:
http://www.comcat.com/~userid/ Replace userid with your username.
For example, the path for the home page belonging to user "abc"
would be "http://www.comcat.com/~abc/".

Refer to the documentation for your WWW browser (e.g., Mosaic
or Lynx) to learn how to open a particular document by specifying
its path (known as a URL).

Once you are happy with your home page, contact
webmaster@comcation.net to have your document added to the
Index of Comcation Customer Web Sites.

You can change your home page at any time simply by editing the
"index.html" file. As you become familiar with HTML, you will
learn how to reference other documents and services from your
home page.