Maintaining Personal Web Pages

Faculty, staff and students who maintain personal web sites on the Wake Forest University web server have access to a variety of features, including:

• Creating a personal web site
• Creating a cgi-bin directory and using CGI scripts
• Using password protection to control access to pages
• Displaying the "last date modified" statement on pages
• Access counts

Creating a Personal Web Site

To create a personal web site, reference the WFU Web Hosting Options comparison to learn more.

Students who need web space for a student organization web site should contact the Information Systems Service Desk at HELP (x4357) or on-line through AskDeac to establish space at groups.wfu.edu. You will need to supply:

• a) Name of the Organization
• b) Purpose (if it's not obvious from name)
• c) Full name and username of the webmaster/administrator(s)

Creating a cgi-bin directory

WFU users can create a cgi-bin directory to house any CGI scripts they may want to use. CGI, or Common Gateway Interface, relies on perl and other programming languages to add functionality to web pages. There are many publicly available CGI scripts that can handle such tasks as creating guestbooks, generating random content or automating e-mail forms.

A collection of scripts is available from the NMS script archive.

To use CGI scripts on your site, follow these steps:

1. Create a cgi-bin directory in your www-home directory and make it world readable.

2. Move all your scripts to the cgi-bin directory and make sure they are all executable by you (chmod 700 or above). Make sure they are NOT write-able by anyone but you.

3. Make sure they are owned by you, and belong to the same login group as you.

4. Change all links to normal scripts to:
/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~userid/scriptname

5. Make sure any local references to files in your scripts are changed to absolute path names (e.g. picture.gif =/users/other/center/user/www-home/images/picture.gif) or are corrected to adjust to the change in location of the script.

The following Unix shell commands will create the directory for you, and move any existing scripts into it:

cd $HOME/www-home mkdir cgi-bin mv *.cgi cgi-bin chmod -R a+rx cgi-bin

Point URLs to your CGI script

To point a URL to your script, use the following syntax:
http://users.wfu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~yourlogin/yourscript

So, if you have a script named test.cgi in your home directory, located in the www-home/cgi-bin subdirectory, and your user login is mozilla, then the URL for your script would be:

http://users.wfu.edu/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~mozilla/test.cgi

You can abbreviate the URL as:
/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/~mozilla/test.cgi

Using passwords to control access to pages

Wake Forest users can protect directories of their site (and the files they contain) by using configuration files for access control. To do so, first create a text file named .htaccess and place it in the directory to be secured. The file must be world-readable. Next, decide what level of access you want to allow. Each example below offers differing levels of access.

Example 1
The following lines within a .htaccess file would allow only people in the 10.*.*.* network range (Reynolda Campus) to access the directory and files:

Example 2
This .htaccess file would require people to enter their WFU password to access the directory and files:

Example 3
This .htaccess file would require people to enter a special password, specified in the "passwords" file, which is an NCSA style password file. Note that the "AuthUserFile" portion of the line below must be edited to reflect the path to the proper directory.

To create the "passwords" file, you would use the htpasswd command on AC. The -c option creates a new file. Here is an example of how to use the command to create a file named passwords:

htpasswd -c passwords test Adding password for test. New password: Re-type new password:

To add additional passwords, repeat the command without the -c option. Now make the file readable:

chmod a+r passwords

Example 4
This .htaccess file would require people to enter their WFU password, would limit access to specific WFU users listed on the Require line, and would restrict access to people on the 10.*.*.* network range (Reynolda Campus)

A warning about using .htaccess: If the .htaccess file becomes corrupted, or not world-readable for some reason, access control may be compromised! For this reason, it is safest to use MULTIPLE .htaccess files in nested directories. For example, to restrict access, place a very restrictive file in the top-level directory, and set permissions and ownerships on the file to make it very difficult for the file to be modified. Then, in each subdirectory, set up less restrictive .htaccess files. This way, if the less-restrictive .htaccess file is removed or modified, the more restrictive file in the parent directory should take over, and access will become more restrictive, not less.

For additional information on using .htaccess files, see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/howto/htaccess.html

Last date modified

The following code will display the modification date of the document it is placed on.

As in:
Last modified: Monday, 16-Apr-2012 03:14:15 EDT

Access counts

The Google Analytics service is available using your WFU Google Mail account.