If you have a monthly or block account with Durham.Net you are entitled to a free personal home page. That is, a page that is not used for business or for-profit use. If you do want to put up a business page, call our support dept. or visit our web site for current pricing, we have very reasonable rates for business pages and corporate services. Before you put up a home page, you should be familiar with the following:
The key to your home page is your User ID. Say your User ID is jsmith. Your email address would be jsmith@durham.net. Your home page location would be http://www.durham.net/~jsmith". That's the address you would give someone if you wanted them to visit your home page. When your account was created, a directory on our server was created with your User ID. It's there to store files that have to do with the configuration of your account and hold your web page. This is known as your "Home Directory". It's in your home directory that your web pages and related files will go.
Microsoft Front Page is an integrated web site design package that requires a web server with Front Page extensions installed. Durham.Net DOES supply web site capabilities for Front Page webs. If you want to publish a Front Page Web, call our support dept. for the details. A Front Page web is infinitely easier to create and maintain web sites with, but requires you to purchase the Front Page package from Microsoft. Call us if you need a Front Page web set up.
Before you can do anything you have to have a home page created. To do this you need to know the HTML language. (HyperText Markup Language) If you don’t know how, there are many good books out there on HTML, and an endless amount of resources on the net. Here are a few places where you can find more information. There are more links in our Weblinks and Web Design sections. A net search for "HTML Help" will always provide an infinite amount of links also.
You can name your html files and their related graphics anything you want. However, do be aware that all file names are case sensitive! By default, all your html files should have the extension .html or .htm. There is only one exception. Your first main page, that is the page you want people to see first, must be called "index.html". (or index.htm is ok) If you tell someone, "Visit my home page at http://www.durham.net/~myid ", their browser will look for a file called index.html at that location (your home directory). If it doesn’t exist, all they will get is a directory listing of the files in your home directory and it’s not very pretty.
With the above in mind, and a working home page, you need to upload it to the server. If you're using an FTP program, set the host name (or address) to ftp.durham.net. Next set the username to your User ID (should be all lower case) and enter your normal login (or email) password. If there is an "Anonymous" checkbox, make sure it’s unchecked. If it’s checked, you’ll just log in to our anonym ous FTP site and that won’t help you here. If you are successful, when you connect you’ll see a directory called "public_html". There may be other odd files there, just ignore them. This is your home directory. Your web pages go into the public_html directory.
Upload your pages to this directory and remember you should have at least one page called index.html. Then load a web browser and enter http://www.durham.net/~yourid into the location box. You should see your newly uploaded home page. You will more than likely notice several mistakes in it as well, perhaps missing graphics or links that go nowhere. You can make the corrections to the origin al files on your system, re-upload them and re-load the page on your browser. If something else isn’t right, repeat the process.
If you're using a program like Pagemill that automatically posts your page, it will need certain configuration information. It will need the homepage location, which is usually ~yourid/public_html. Or the program may require something like "http://www.durham.net/~yourid". Refer to the help for whichever software you're using, our support department can help to a certain extent but we don't know the specifics of every web design program out there.
If you've designed your page on your computer, your pages are more than likely loaded with references like <A HREF="file:///c:\homepage\contents.html ">. This references a file on your local computer. When people access your home page, your computer won't be there. Therefore, the above link would have to change to <A HREF="http://www.durham.net/~myuserid/contents.html" >. This includes all references to pages, graphics and any other content on your home page. This doesn’t include of course, intentional links to other people’s home pages, like our "Web Links" section on our home page
If while browsing the Web, you see a home page and wonder "How’d they do that?", you can find out by selecting "View Source" from the edit menu of either Netscape or Explorer. It will display the HTML source for you, and you can cut and paste any examples. You can also save any graphics by right clicking on them and choosing "Save As…". This does not mean you’re free to plagiarize other people’s pages, but it can help you learn how to implement page features you might see elsewhere.
Your home page comes with certain limits. There are two terms you’ll need to familiarize yourself with, "Disk Space" and "Traffic". With a personal web page, you get a certain amount of disk space and traffic free. At the writing of this document, you would have 3 megabytes of disk space and 100 megabytes of traffic before any usage charges would apply.
Disk space is the total amount of disk space in megabytes, that your entire home page occupies. This includes HTML files, graphics, programs, or anything else you store in your "public_html" directory on our server. If you exceed this amount, a charge of $0.25 per megabyte per month will be incurred.
Traffic is the total number of bytes, in megabytes, that are transferred from your home directory, to other sites outside of durham.net (i.e. a user from microsoft.com reading your page). If a user dialed into durham.net hits your page, no traffic charges are incurred. So if your home page and all it’s contents are 1 megabyte in size (quite a huge page), 100 people per month could view your entire page per month. Browsing users may only hit your first page, others may view all your pages. It varies . After your first 100 megabytes, a charge of $0.10/Megabyte of traffic per month will be incurred. So if you put in twice your allowable amount of traffic, (200M) it would only cost you another $10 for the month (100 x $0.10). In most cases, the free starting amounts are sufficient for a basic personal page. Also note that the above prices and figures are subject to change. You can check our home page or call support for the latest rates and figures.
You may want to add certain features to your page like counters, forms or other server based features. You can run any CGI Perl script on the server you like, but in order for it to work we need to enable execute status here for you. If you need a CGI enabled that you've uploaded yourself, call our support number. We will need to first check the CGI for security, and if ok, we'll enable it for execution.
If you want to have a counter on your page, Durham.Net has a page counter installed and available for anyone to use, and it's quite simple to implement. Simply place the following line anywhere in your HTML code where you want the counter to appear:
<IMG SRC=" http://www.durham.net/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=myname.dat" ALIGN=ABSCENTER>
In the above line, notice the part that says "df-myname.dat". This specifies the name of the data file that will hold the value of your counter. It's stored here on the server and must have a unique name. Your username would be a good name. The counter appears like the one on our Main Page, but you can change its apperance or even have it show the time/date. If you need to change it, options for the counter can be found here.
We also supply a generic email script. It will take data from an html form on your homepage and email the results to a given email address (yours?). The instructions can be found here for it.
If you need a message board, you can set up and taylor your own using our You Said It interface. Details about setting up one of those can be found there. Any of these scripts are free for Durham.Net customers to use on their personal or business home pages. Give us a call if you have any questions.
As far as content is concerned, we ask that you use common sense. Illegal material such as pirated software, kiddie porn, etc. we please ask that you do not publish such materials on the web. If you wish to post adult or content sensitive material, please supply a cover page or warning page so someone’s kids don’t stumble into it. Generally, you are allowed to include links to other pages, Java or Javascript, MIDI or Wave audio. As far as advanced and leading edge technologies go, we can try to help you with these but please keep in mind that our support staff may not know everything. If you have general questions about getting your home page uploaded and loading properly, please feel free to call our support number.
Finally, once your page is complete and you’re ready to unleash it
on an unsuspecting world, you may want to have it added to the various
search engines around the net. One could visit every search engine
available but it’s much easier to go to www.addme.com or
www.register-it.com. The pages
there allow you to post your site address with a staggering list of
Internet search engines. Doing so is free of charge for the main engines.