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3. Going public - Allowing others to browse and search your pages

3.1. Publishing your pages onto the web

3.1.1. Publishing your pages onto the web

The final step is to place your page onto a web server , so that it can be browsed from anywhere on the internet, and so that the pages can be searched by search engines.

3.1.2. Your web server, user name and password

For this tutorial, you will be able to publish your project pages onto a web server located at AustLII. Its address is 'student.austlii.edu.au', and it is also called ‘sandpit’.
Your username is surname
Your password is [as instructed in class]

3.1.3. Setting the publishing defaults

If you are publishing your pages from a computer that is used only be you, then you should set up publishing defaults so that your files will always be published to your correct directory on sandpit.
In Netscape Composer the selection [Edit | Preferences | Composer | Publishing] "Publish to (FTP or HTML)' box should be set to read
ftp://student.austlii.edu.au/home/tute99/public_html/
You should also complete the 'User Name' and 'Password' boxes below with your details, then OK to complete. Do not include these details on a computer which is used by others - just enter them every time you intend to publish new pages.

3.1.4. Publishing your pages to the web server

To publish the page you have created to your directory on sandpit, select the publish icon to open the 'Publish Files' window. Click on 'Use Default Location'. All of your details should appear. If they do not, complete or correct the boxes under 'Publishing location' manually. You must include your username and password. OK to complete. A message will appear to inform you whether or not you have successfully published your page to the sandpit server.

3.1.5. Testing your web page

Now use the browser to check that you have successfully published your page on the web. Save the location as a bookmark.
If you published a pages as:
ftp://student.austlii.edu.au/home/tute99/public_html/FILENAME.HTM
then you browse the page as:
http://student.austlii.edu.au/~tute99/FILENAME.HTM

How to prevent pages being browsed (the index.html page) - for information only

It is possible to see what files are contained in someone's /public_html/ directory, or any sub-directories contained therein, even if there are no links to those pages from other pages.
For example, if you browse to my /public_html/ directory on sandpit,
http://student.austlii.edu.au/~greenlea/

you would see the following automatically generated index, which allows access to all pages currently in my /public_html/ directory:

The proper way to stop this happening is to place a page called 'index.html' (or 'index.htm') in each directory or sub-directory. Each 'index.html' page should only contain links to those pages which you wish to allow to be browsed. The 'index.html' page stops an automatic index being generated.

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