NWE Help: Web: Authoring: Files and URLs

NWE Home :: Help :: Web :: Authoring

If you want to use the NWE server to make web pages, there are a few things you should know about the way file names on the NWE system map to web page addresses. First, two things:

• Make absolutely certain that you are creating the pages in your public_html directory. The help pages for asWe and web authoring describe how to check this in detail.

• Follow our file naming guidelines. Web pages should have names which end in .html or .htm.

Whenever someone loads a web page hosted from the NWE, the NWE web server automatically translates the web address of that page into a filename, finds that file, and sends it over the internet to the viewer. Here's a few examples of the way that translation works:

Note the consistency in the translation -- the /home/nwe/jdoe/public_html/ part of the filename never changes. That's because the web server only looks for files in your public_html directory.

Your web address (also called a uniform resource locator, or URL) is:

    http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~username/

Basically, the web server takes everything after your username and adds it to /home/username/web/ to get the file name to load. If the requested URL ends in a slash, the web server will add "index.html" to that name as well.

Why is it important you know this? Well, you'll be editing these files, so you'll need to know the right names so you can load them in our HTML editor. If you get the file names wrong, the files may not display on the web. Don't worry, there's more help on this in the documentation for our HTML editor.

Any directory which does not contain a file named index.html or index.shtml will be displayed as a file list.