How To Create a User Home Page on Primenet's User Server

Please read the Primenet Acceptable Use Policy and user agreement before creating your pages. The advertisement of products or services for sale in your web pages requires a Primenet business account. Resale of web space is only permitted on the Primenet Commerce Server.

Primenet users may use up to 5 MB of web space at no additional charge (provided that the 5 MB user disk quota is not exceeded). Additional disk space is $2.50/5 MB/mo for personal accounts and $25/5 MB/mo for business accounts if arranged in advance, and $3.50/5 MB/mo for personal accounts and $30/5 MB/mo for business accounts if not arranged in advance.

Pages which get extremely high volumes of traffic are also subject to surcharges, which apply after 1,000 MB of traffic per month. You can monitor this traffic with the "acctlook" command on your shell account. (It's available on the shell menu under User Setup, as part of the output of "Check Time Used.") The number of "hits" reported by this command includes accesses on individual graphic images. If you have a page which contains four separate images, then it takes five "hits" to load the page on a graphic browser (assuming the images aren't already cached by that browser). If one image is repeated throughout a document (e.g., a bullet or icon), it is only loaded once per page by all browsers I'm aware of.

To create your web pages, first login to your shell account (either by dialing in directly or by telnetting from a SLIP or PPP account). (For more information about using your shell account, if you have a Macintosh and the Primenet software package, see the Additional Help file in your Primenet folder. Otherwise, for more information see a book that covers some Internet UNIX basics such as Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog from O'Reilly and Associates.)

Enter one of the UNIX shells (e.g., bash). Enter the command:

makehtml

1. Create a directory under your home directory called public_html with the permissions set appropriately so that the web server can get to it. All of your user web pages must be placed in this directory.
2. Create a sample web page called sample.html. This is your home page and you can edit it to reflect your personality and taste (or lack thereof). When you have edited it, you must change its name to index.html with the command

   mv sample.html index.html
   

Please note: If you set up your web pages the day your account is set up, your web pages may not be available until after midnight.

(Please note that in actuality your public_html directory is a symbolic link to another directory, /var/http/u/us/username. If you unlink your public_html directory and create a new one, the files placed into it will NOT be found by the web server--you must recreate the link.)

All files in your web directory must have the permissions set so that the web server can get to them. If you're uploading files directly into your public_html directory with a SLIP/PPP FTP client program and you created your directory with the makehtml command, the permissions should automatically be set correctly. Otherwise, you can set the permissions on any file you create by using the UNIX chmod command:

chmod go+r FILENAME

Please note that if you are using the WS_FTP client, you need to make sure that "View Links" is set to "as directories" under "Session Options."

If you'd like to set up imagemaps on your pages, use the imagemap CGI bin: <A HREF = "http://web.archive.org/web/199603/http://www.primenet.com/cgi-bin/imagemap/~loginname/mapfile"><IMG SRC = "[unarchived-media]" ISMAP></A>

Image maps should be in NCSA format, and make sure every line of the mapfile ends with a linefeed, not a carriage return.

If you are a commerce server user, use http://com.primenet.com/cgi-bin/imagemap/aliasname/mapfile.

For information on setting up a counter on your page, see Timothy C. Piantiada's counter setup page. Primenet uses this counter program. Make sure you know the rules!

If you are a commerce server user, use the counter at http://com.primenet.com/cgi-bin/Count.cgi.

To display your counters without changing the counts, use http://www.primenet.com/cgi-bin/display-counter.pl. If you are a commerce server user, use http://com.primenet.com/cgi-bin/display-counter.pl.

Users are not permitted to run CGI scripts in their own directories. CGI scripts can only be run from the system cgi-bin directory. Scripts to be installed there must be security audited first, at $100/hr (in 15-minute increments). This charge may be waived if a script is of general use. No scripts that can read from or write to arbitrary files are acceptable, however. The source code for a number of scripts available for general use may be found at http://www.primenet.com/~lippard/scripts/. There is little in the way of documentation available, though see the links regarding "fill-out forms" and CGI scripts on the WWW FAQ (linked below). Primenet has cgi-lib.pl, cgi_handlers.pl, and the CGI.pm perl5 object library installed. Much good information about CGI scripts is available on the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi newsgroup.

If you need additional assistance in setting up your home pages on Primenet, you might want to take a look at Kenny Bellew's description of his experiences setting up web pages.

For more information on the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format that web pages are in, see C.J. Mandrake's HTML Primer, the World Wide Web FAQ, the HTML Crash Course, or WebCom's HTML Information.

Primenet does not provide free email or telephone tech support for web design and creation, though paid consulting is available. You may receive assistance by posting in the primenet.help.www newsgroup.