How to Put Up Your Own Web Pages on CWCi

Put Your Own Home Pages on the Web

There are a few basic steps to setting up your own World Wide Web home page on Crystal Wind's system.
Requirements:

An editor of some sort, either a text editor or one specifically designed for creating WWW pages (an HTML editor).
An FTP client program.
Your login name and password that you use to logon to Crystal Wind.
And of course some idea of what you want to do

If you don't have an FTP client, there are some links at the end of this page for some FTP clients. My personal favorite is WS_FTP, a freeware (yes, that means it is free!) FTP program that has many features. WS_FTP(LE) is included on CWCi's installation CD. There are also some links for primers on HTML and HTML authoring programs down at the end of this page as well.

For the rest of this short tutorial, we are going to assume we have a login name of webguy and a login password of 123456. You'll want to substitute your information where I use this for it to work for you.

Step 1...Create your web page or pages.
There are a couple of important things to remember here.

Your main page must be called index.html or index.htm
All pages that come after that main, or home page, may be called anything you like, provided it is a legal filename ending in html or htm.

To illustrate this, we'll use our dummy user webguy. Webguy's home page address would be http://www.xtalwind.net/~webguy/
The web server reads that as -let's look in the user webguy's home directory for a directory called public_html and see if there's a file called index.html or index.htm in there.
Any other pages that webguy creates besides the index.html (or index.htm), he'll call by names like:
page2.html
page3.html
and so forth. Any graphics that are referred to do not need to be referenced with an address, just the name of the file. The web server is smart enough to know to get the image files out of the same directory that the page is in.

Step 2...FTP the files up to your public_html directory.
Configure your FTP program to log in with your logon name and password. In our example here, we'll configure ours as webguy with his password of 123456. The server for CWCi is onyx.xtalwind.net.
When we get logged in, we'll see some files and a directory called public_html ... We want to change directories to the public_html directory, and then transfer our files up into that directory.(using most FTP programs, double-clicking on the directory name will take you into that directory.) Once we have that done, we want to make sure that our main file is named index.html. With WS_FTP, the program I referred to earlier, this is one of the functions that is available. Just highlight the file on the SERVER side, then click on rename, and rename it to index.html. Other FTP programs may vary. Your pages are now ready to be viewed.

Step 3...Go see your handiwork!
Start your WWW Browser and view your pages! Remember that your URL (universal resource locater) is http://www.xtalwind.net/~unixusername/ (our example would be http://www.xtalwind.net/~webguy/ )
If your pages aren't exactly as you want them to appear, repeat steps 1,2, and 3 until you get what you want.

Step 4...notify the webmaster
Let the webmaster know that you have a page up (email her at webmaster@xtalwind.net) and she will get it added to the subscribers' home pages list!

TUCOWS has several FTP clients from which to choose, and is an excellent sources of all types of software. (These are WINDOWS95/98-specific software sites, but links are provided to the home site of each application, which will have the software for other operating systems, if supported.)
NOTE: Be sure to choose the correct software, 16-bit)(WIN 3x) or 32-bit(WIN 95/98), for your system. This link is for WIN 95/98, but a link is provided from this page to WIN 3.x applications.
TUCOWS - The Ultimate Collection of Windows Software (fast Florida mirror site)
WINFILES (by C|NET) - A great site for most Windows software
Stroud's Consummate Winsock Applications - The Resource Center for the Internet

The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life.
--The Players Litany from 'The Long Run' by Daniel Keys Moran