Introduction

Naming Files

Directories and Files
       public_html
       index.html
       images
       sub-directories

Linking Files

File URL

Cheat Sheet

Evaluate this tutorial

PDF Handout

Directories and Files

Once you’ve created all your Web pages, you are ready to transfer your files to the Web server. Each account on the Web server has a home directory (or folder). When you login, you will be in your home directory (please reference our tutorials on SSH or Fugu to learn how to transfer your files to the Web server; for information specific to using your iSchool account to post webpages, check out our tutorial on how to use your School of Information account).

Within your UNIX account you should use (or create if there is no such folder) the following:

public_html

Within your home directory, you need a sub-directory called public_html. It will contain your Web pages. If you login for the first time, you need to create this directory (please reference our tutorial on how to publish Web Pages). This should be the main folder intended for HTML files. This public_html folder should contain all of your HTML files. You will create those files either with an HTML editor (such as Dreamweaver or Mozilla Composer) or by writing the HTML code yourself.

Figure 3

You should transfer your homepage into the public_html directory and name the page as index.html. This will be your homepage and the URL will be: http://www.ischool.utexas.edu/~yourusername.

You need to have a sub-directory named images in your public_html directory that contains all the images referenced in index.html and other Web pages contained in public_html. You can put all of your general graphics files, the buttons, logos, background images, photos, etc. in the images folder. Linking to the images in these folders has a different method. To link to a folder inside your main folder (or, in other words, to link "forward"), your link must start with the name of the folder and a slash. A link to an image in your images folder, then, would look like this: images/picture.jpg (or images/picture.gif). We’ll discuss how to link files in detail at the Linking Files page.

Figure 4

sub-directories

If you're building pages on your resume and the class projects, these should be kept in their appropriate sub-directories.

1. You should have a sub-directory within your public_html directory called resume, and projects (see Figure 4).
2. You will put different formats of your resume, for example, HTML(.html), PDF (.pdf), and straight text (.txt) in the resume sub-directory.
   
   Figure 5
   
   
   
3. Within the projects sub-directory, you should create an index.html page that presents information on projects and you should put all your projects into this folder.
4. If you have many projects and you want to categorize them within the projects sub-directory, you may create several sub-directories. For example, you can create webDesign sub-directory within projects sub-directory to save all your projects related to Web Design; or you can create a sub-directory called database within projects sub-directory and you can put all your database projects into this sub-directory.
   
   Figure 6
   

The whole structure, displayed graphically, would look like this:

Figure 7

next section >

Watch the video

choose format/speed
dial-up | broadband
dial-up | broadband
dial-up | broadband

Tutorial Transcript