Creating a Webpage for Your Astronomy Class

Each semester, we will post links on the department website to all current instructor course pages. This will allow students to rapidly locate your pages.

To create a webpage for an Astronomy class, create a subdirectory called public_html in your home directory. Within that directory, create another directory with the name of the class as the directory name. For example, if you are teaching ASTR101, you should create a directory within public_html called ASTR101. Finally, create a file called index.html in this class directory to be displayed as the class home page. This file must be in HTML (see bottom of page for training resources).

It is important that the two directories and index.html file have protections which make them readable by everyone. You can achieve this by using the command "chmod a+r index.html" and the command "chmod a+rx" on each of the directories.

As an example, suppose that Doug Hamilton was going to add a page for the ASTR101 class. He would move to his home directory (/home/dphamil) and type the following commands:


	mkdir public_html
	chmod a+rx public_html
	cd public_html
	mkdir ASTR101
	chmod a+rx ASTR101
	cd ASTR101
	vi index.html
	chmod a+r index.html

Of course, your favorite editor can be used in place of vi.

When this is finished, contact the webmaster and let him/her know which class is going to have a home page in your directory. It would be helpful to pass the entire directory path to the index.html file. Your link should appear on the department page by the next day.

HTML References

The following websites are generally useful for creating HTML webpages:

  • HTML Tutorial: This a webpage which provides a very general overview of the various HTML tags and syntax help.
  • HTML Goodies: A little more intensive HTML help webpage with some other goodies.