How to put your pages on the Web (in about 5 minutes)

This handout is written for people who know a little bit about HTML and about the World Wide Web. If you find yourself getting confused, you can either send mail to the Opus One support line, or you can ask your WWW designer to help you out.

First, a bit about our systems. The Opus One servers are VMS platforms, and the file system syntax is slightly different from UNIX or DOS. If you're used to seeing

/usr/myhome/www/subdir/filename

you'll see this instead on VMS:

disk$ebony:[myhome.www.subdir]filename.ext;27

From ftp, when you log in with your own username and password you will already be at 'disk$ebony:[myhome]'. You can usually cd into your web tree with the explicit syntax

ftp> cd [.www.subdir]

VMS keeps multiple copies of the same file; the ';27' on the end of the file above is the version number. This can be very handy, as you can recover an old version of a file if you make a mistake. If you never see the version number from your ftp client that just means it is hiding it from you; you can be confident that you are always working with the most recent version of your file.

The other thing you should be aware of is that VMS is not a case-sensitive operating system. This means that a file index.html is the same as a file INDEX.HTML.

Now, on to your web pages.

Know your real URL

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/

You picked out <your-domain-name> when you set up your account; it is probably something like cellphone.com. <your-qualifier> is what separates out your pages from everyone else's at this site. This is usually something short, often an abbreviation of your domain name. If you don't remember what both of these are, send mail to support and ask.

What we do as part of your business service is build a special alias so that the URL:

http://<your-domain-name>/

will automatically translate to your "real" home page, which is the http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/ URL. This means that you don't need to tell other people what <your-qualifier> is (unless you want them to see some page other than your home page), but you may need to know what this is if you decide to put absolute references in your HTML.

If you are an Opus One personal service customer, your home page URL will look like this:

http://www.opus1.com/~<your-username>/

Where the tilde (~) is that funny character and <your-username> is whatever you use to log in to read your mail.

If you are awaiting domain name registration from the InterNIC (or other domain name registrar), you can still access your pages using the URL

http://www.opus1.com/<your-qualifier>/

Make yourself a home page

Most people prefer to use FTP to load files into their WWW site. Because there are dozens of different FTP clients (many of which have lots of bugs in them), we can't give you step-by-step instructions. However, the general scheme goes like this:

• connect to ftp.opus1.com using your username and password
• change your directory to be the "www" subdirectory
• push up the file index.html

Note that if you want to use the preprocessor, your file must have an extension of .HTMLX instead of just .HTML or .HTM.

Test it

You should do both forms of your URL, the public one:

http://<your-domain-name>/

and the real one:

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/

Tell us you're ready

Here are the most common questions and problems that people have when designing WWW pages:

Relative versus Absolute URLs

http://<your-domain-name>/

or

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/

or

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>

(notice that the trailing slash is missing)

and all will work.

We strongly recommend that you only publish the first form (without the qualifier) because otherwise you will have to be very, very careful about how you refer to other pages in your site.

For example, let's suppose you have some HTML that looks like this (this is a relative URL reference, because it does not have the full URL in it):

Click <a href="more.html"> here </a> for more information.

In this case, the browser will peel off everything after the rightmost slash on the last URL that the user specified and put your reference at the end. Thus, if someone came in the second way, the new URL would be:

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/more.html

but if they came in the third way:

http://<your-domain-name>/more.html

which will not work.

If you never give anyone any URL besides your home page URL, you can also refer to the file this way:

Click <a href="more.html"> here </a> for more information.

If you want to be sure that any page properly jumps over to any other page, no matter how you got there (for example, via a search engine), you need to put the URL in like this:

Click <a href="/<your-qualifier>/more.html"> here 
</a> for more information.

or, if you really want to make sure that the page works all the time with all browsers:

Click <a href="http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/more.html"> here </a> for more information.

For an even gorier explanation of this situation, request the file web.dilemma via email from support.

Binary Files

We encourage you to be a good net citizen, and photo edit your images to reduce their size to less than 15K each. This can usually be done by reducing the number of colors or pixels in an image.

Scripts

Subdirectories

http://<your-domain-name>/<your-qualifier>/part2/overview.html

file: opus_root:[doc]web.howto
version 11-Jan-1999/jlt