There have already been a few articles in The DataBus explaining how to put your own home page on-line on dmapub. My article from the January '96 issue is reproduced below. Keith Obermeier had an article in the February '96 issue titled "How to Write a Home Page", which discussed the actual HTML coding.

How to get your home page on-line

by Dave Lundy, DMA® member and dmapub Administrator
(See Dave's home page at
http://www.dma.org/~lundyd/)

The DMA® home page now has a pointer to our members' personal home pages. To be automatically included in the list you need only follow a few simple conventions. Your home page must be named index.html (or index.htm, index.shtml, or index.php) and reside in the directory /home/your_login_name/public_html. The file must be readable by all and your home directory and the public_html directory must be publicly searchable. Any DMA® member may create a home page, even if they don't have Enhanced Internet service. We will continue to allow free creation of home pages by DMA® members as long as the privilege is not abused. In particular, that means no commercial advertising. Of course you will still be expected to be conservative of disk and other system resource usage.

To create a home page that will be automatically included on DMA's page takes only a few steps. First, you must be a DMA® member and have a Linux account with us. Second, if you are using our menu, you must exit the menu to the Linux shell. From the shell prompt, type the following:

chmod 711 ../$LOGNAME

You may use 775 or 755 or 751 if you prefer. Using 711 helps keep prying eyes out of your home directory. Read the man pages for chmod to see what the difference is. Of course you may type your login name instead of $LOGNAME, but either will work.

The next step is to create a public_html directory that is searchable. Type the following commands. Note: all text following and including # are comments and are not part of the command.

mkdir public_html       # this creates the directory
chmod 711 public_html   # this makes it searchable
cd public_html          # this puts you in the new directory

The final step is to write the index.html file in your public_html directory, and make it readable by all. Use your favorite editor to create the file in place, or write it off-line and upload it. In either case, you will need to type one more command to make it accessible to the world, and that is:

chmod 644 index.html

The actual details of writing the index.html file is a separate topic. Read the help pages in lynx to get started. Or, if you have a PPP account, do the same with your favorite web browser. Or stop by your favorite bookstore and pick up a book about web page authoring. Or get yourself a program to do the dirty work for you, such as Hot Dog, etc. It's not very difficult. You just have to pay some attention to details, but the rules are fairly simple.

Finally, it isn't required that your home page be in a file named index.html, but it must be in a directory named (or a sub-directory of) public_html. It will not be automatically recognized and added to our home page if it isn't. If you use these guidelines, your URL will be:

"http://www.dma.org/~your_login_name/".

If you choose to use a different file name, such as my_page.html (note: the extension html or htm or shtml or php is required), your URL would then be: "http://www.dma.org/~your_login_name/my_page.html". Also, remember that your page will NOT be automatically added to our list if its name is not exactly "index.html" or "index.htm" or "index.shtml" or "index.php".

The list is automatically updated on the 1st and 15th of each month.