Spin Your Own Web
Spin Your Own Web
World Wide Web pages are not hard to write. Anyone who knows how to write a coherent sentence can learn the basics of Web authoring in five minutes.
The language of the Web is called HTML, the Hypertext Markup Language.
In six easy steps, you can become an information provider on the Web:
If you have an obscure.org account, you can have your own home page on the World Wide Web. If you don't, you can probably get one from wherever you are getting your internet account. This tutorial is tailored to Obscure Organization users.
People have written many good introductions to HTML. This is a list of the best ones I have found:
You could create your web directory by hand. I learned how from a GMU tutorial. To take the easy way out, and start a terminal session with Obscure with telnet or ssh. For example, you can type "telnet shell.obscure.org" at the command prompt or "Run" facility of most operating systems to start this session. After entering your username and password, you need to type command:
startweb
This will create a publicly-accessible Web page in your directory. The name of this directory is public_html. The directory is readable by anyone on this server, and through some Web server magic, to everyone around the world.
The address of a web page is referred to as a URL, a Uniform Resource Locator. Your home page address will be of the form:
http://www.obscure.org/~username
(Of course, replace the phrase "username" with your obscure user ID.)
You can then use Lynx or another browser to view your home page. To use lynx to view your home page, type:
lynx http://www.obscure.org/~loginid
You could also type:
lynx index.html
Lynx can be used in this way to view any local file.
All of your publicly-accessible Web files need to go in the directory public_html. You can change directories to that directory by typing:
cd public_html
You will notice that your prompt now reflects the directory. You can edit your homepage by typing:
edit index.html
You probably want to jazz up your home page with graphics, or some text you have on your home computer.
Remember that at obscure.org, we do not have huge disks or a fast net connection, so sparing use of graphics is appropriate. Small graphics files (<50KB) are good. JPEG files are better than GIF files for photo-realistic images, and much smaller. Please use them for such images.
If you want to add files to your homepage, you need to get them into your public_html directory.
In your home page, you can refer to these files by adding an anchor tag of the following format:
<A HREF="/~loginid/mylinks.html">My Links</A>
If you are using Obscure through an Internet connection, you need to use ftp to transfer the files from your computer to the obscure.org server. Tell your FTP client to connect to 'shell.obscure.org', and put the files into the "public_html" directory.
If you have Secure Shell installed on your computer, you can use the "scp" utility to copy files into your public_html directory.
If you are calling The Obscure Organization through a regular dialup modem connection, you can use the rz command to do this. Change directories to your public_html directory by typing:
cd ~/public_html
then type:
rz
Then, start a Zmodem send from your terminal program and select the files you want to be on your home page.
Once you have a page, tell all your friends about it. You might want to put a reference to it in your .signature file, so that anyone who gets mail from you or reads a news posting from you receives the address of your home page.
You might want to register your home page with Google or other web search engines, so the whole world can find it.
Last modified September 21st, 2000
If you have questions concerning the web page creation process, please contact:
Richard Bullington <rbulling@obscure.org>