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Your site

Your site URL will be: 

https://people.engr.tamu.edu/<netid> 

Where <netid> is replaced with your actual NetID (without the <>).

Editing your site

You will edit your site by using an SFTP client to connect to the people authoring site people-edit.engr.tamu.edu.

Clients

SFTP clients enable you to upload files from your local machine to the web site via SFTP, as well as download files to your local machine from the web site. Listed next are some common clients based on common operating systems.

Windows

WinSCP

A free, commonly used SFTP client available from winscp.net.

Note when using WinSCP

Because Amazon S3 manages object timestamps, be sure to disable WinSCP timestamp settings before you perform file transfers. To do so, in the WinSCP Transfer settings dialog box, disable the Set permissions upload option and the Preserve timestamp common option.

Mac

Cyberduck

A fully featured free SFTP client that supports much more than just SFTP. It is available from cyberduck.io.

Sftp

Mac users that are familiar with the command line can simply run the sftp command.

Linux

Filezilla (Standard)

A common free SFTP client available in your Linux distribution’s package repository. The name of the package and method of installation varies per distribution (Google for it based on your distribution, i.e. Ubuntu, Centos, Arch, etc.).

Sftp

Linux users that are familiar with the command line can simply run the sftp command.

Where to connect

When connecting via your favorite SFTP client, you will use the following host:

people-edit.engr.tamu.edu

to perform all of your uploads. You will enter your NetID and NetID password for username and password respectively.

Authoring your site

Following these guidelines when adding content to your site:

  1. If you want to hand out a URL with a directory instead of a file (for example https://people.tamu.edu/netid, you will need to add an index.html file to the directory so that a page will load.

  2. All files must have an extension (i.e. end with .html, .txt, .jpg, etc.).

  3. Directories cannot have a dot (“.”) in the name or they will not work properly.

To start building your page, create an index.html file on your local machine and upload it to your directory. 

You should view and develop your index.html and other pages locally, then upload them to the SFTP server when you are finished making changes.

When you create a link inside of a web page, the link should look something like this:

<a href=”/netid/my_page.html”>My page</a>

and NOT like this:

<a href=”https://people.engr.tamu.edu/netid/my_page.html”>My page</a>

Making relative links like the first one allows your page to work properly on your local computer as well as the remote server. This makes development easy because you can see changes in your local web browser and only upload once when you are finished making changes.

Connection setup using Filezilla

Filezilla Example (your client will vary)

Open the Filezilla application

Add a new Site

  1. Go to File > Site Manager (a window will pop up)

  2. Click on the New Site button on the left side

  3. Type people-edit into the box that pops up

  4. Select SFTP - SSH File Transfer Protocol from the Protocol dropdown on the right side

  5. Type in people-edit.engr.tamu.edu into the Host field

  6. Type your NetID into the User field (See Figure 1 for an example of steps 1-6)

  7. Type your NetID password into the Password field (this will be removed if you opt not to have your password remembered in step 11).

  8. Click OK

  9. Choose either Save Password to have your password remembered, or Do Not Save Password to enter it each time. It is more secure to pick the latter option.

A screenshot showing the fields in the General tab properly entered.

Figure 1


Connect to your site

  1. Go to File > Site Manager (a window will pop up)

  2. Click on people-edit on the left side

  3. Click on the Connect button

  4. When prompted with the text “The server’s host key is unknown. You have no guarantee that the server is the computer you think it is.” check the Always trust this host, add this key to the cache box and click OK

Add a Welcome Page to your site

  1. Create a directory just for housing your website files called Engineering People Site and make a note of where the directory lives

  2. Create a file named index.html in your newly created Engineering People Site directory using your favorite text editor and place the following contents in the file: 

    <html>

<header>

<title>Welcome to my site!</title>

</header>


<body>

<h2>Welcome to my site!</h2>

</body>


</html>

  3. View your new index.html page locally in your browser by going to your favorite web browser, going to File > Open, and browsing to your new page. Once you are satisfied with the page, proceed to the next step.

  4. Connect to the people-edit site by using the directions under Connect to Your Site

  5. In the upper left window of Filezilla, navigate to the Engineering People Site directory that you created earlier. You will see the index.html file in the lower left window. (See Figure 3 for an example).

  6. Right-click on the index.html file in the lower left window and select Upload

  7. If the file is new, then it will be uploaded and you will be finished. However, if you make edits to the file and upload it again, the file will already exist on the server and you will receive a prompt about how to handle overriding the file. The easiest option is to always override the file on the server (see Figure 4 for what these override options look like).

  8. You can now view your site in the browser by going to people.engr.tamu.edu/<netid> (replacing <netid> with your real NetID)

Due to server-side caching, it may take up to 2 minutes for your changes to appear; this is why it is important to develop your page on your local machine before uploading it.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Adding Directory Listings to your site

Sometimes you want a directory to have its contents listed so that users can freely download files without creating a traditional index.html where you manually link to everything. In Apache, these are called directory listings. 

This is not possible with the current solution by default, so you must add a special index.html file to the directory that you want to have contents listed. In order to use the directory listing feature, download index.html, and place it on your site in whatever directory you want to see the listings. Now you can give out the link to that directory and the listings will show up in a similar way to the traditional Apache web server listings.

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