Personal Web Server Help

Create a Home Page

Your home page

Opening the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel

Personalizing your home page

Adding pictures from the Scrapbook to your home page

Adding links to your home page

URL basics

Your Home page

Cruise the Internet and you can hit home pages all over the world. But you don't have to be a big company to have your own home page. There are many benefits to having your own place in cyberspace, not the least of which is the transfer of documents and images. Thousands of small businesses, organizations and schools use home pages for communications, advertising and sales. You could even create a home page and feature your favorite recipes.

So what is a home page? Home pages are simply text files that contain special commands that format fonts and pictures on your screen and activate your browser, to go from place to place. Usually, they are written in what is called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and are saved as files that have .htm or .html extensions.

To help you get started on the World Wide Web, Personal Web Server comes with a default home page that you can personalize with information about yourself and your favorite links. And how do you add more files to your Web site? If you're familiar with HTML, you can use it to create files for publishing. However, with Microsoft Personal Web Server, you don't need to learn HTML to add Web pages to your site. Personal Web Server allows you to use Simple Text to create your Web files. This feature offers a simple way to display Web pages without having to learn the sometimes confusing Hypertext Markup Language.

Your home page can be accessed with any browser. However, when you, and visitors to your Web site use Internet Explorer, your Web pages will look their best. Internet Explorer lets you take advantage of some of the latest HTML features such as style sheets and frames. For more information on HTML visit, http://www.microsoft.com/workshop/author/newhtml.

What can visitors do on my home page?
What visitors can do on your Web site depends largely on the settings you have selected on the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel. For example, you can restrict access to the Web site so that only users that you have defined in your Sharing Setup can access selected folders. Most visitors, however, can send you private messages, read and sign your guest book, and access files in your My Shared Documents folder.

What can I do on my home page?
Your home page contains an Owner Sign-in link. When anyone clicks this link they will be asked to type the owner name and password. As discussed in the Security Overview, you should pick a hard-to-guess password such as one that contains a combination of letters and numbers. When you successfully complete the owner sign-in, you will see that a new heading is displayed on your Web site: Site Administration. You can use the links under Site Administration to read private messages, check server status, and to stop the server. But, that's not all that you can do when you visit your home page. If you have selected the Let Me Access Disk Remotely check box on the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel, a second heading will display on your home page: Remote Disk Access. The links under this heading allow you to browse and download files from your computer remotely.

Where do I start?
As you have learned, Microsoft Personal Web Server lets you create a Web site that's fun for visitors and easy to maintain. Your first step is to get your home page up and running by doing the following:

Personalize your home page
Publish your Web site
Visit your Web site

Once your home page set up and you are publishing your Web site, review the Microsoft Personal Web Help topics to find how you can further enhance your Web site.

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To open the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel

From the Apple menu, open Control Panels, and then double-click Microsoft Personal Web Server.
The Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel enables you to turn the Web server on and off and change several other Web-server options. It also enables you to monitor your Web site activity and personalize the home page that comes with Personal Web Server.

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To personalize your home page

Open the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel.
Click the About Me button.
From the This Site Is For My pop-up menu, choose the best description of your site. When you change the selection in the pop-up menu, Personal Web Server allows you to type information that is more appropriate for your Web site.
Type the information requested in each box and skip any items that you don't want to appear.
Paste or drag pictures into the two designated areas. You can use almost any picture that you have on your computer. If you don't have a picture of yourself in a picture file or a clipping file, try using a picture from the Scrapbook.
Click the Links button at the top of control panel to add links to your home page.
Your home page is updated automatically when you save new information. If you already have your Web site open, choose Refresh from the Internet Explorer View menu so that you can view the updated information.

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To add pictures from the Scrapbook to your home page

From the Apple menu, choose Scrapbook.
Select the picture that you want to use. The picture doesn't have to be a specific size or shape. Even if you use a picture that is larger or smaller than the picture area, the picture will appear properly on your home page.
From the Edit menu, choose Copy.
Open the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel.
Click the About Me button.
Click the picture area.
From the Edit menu, choose Paste.
Your home page is updated automatically when you save new information. However, if your Web site is already open, choose Refresh from the Internet Explorer View menu so that you can see the updated information.

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To add links to your home page

Open the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel and click the Links button.
In the Page Description box, describe the document or Web site to which this link will point. This text will be the actual text for the link.
In the corresponding URL box, type the URL of the document that you want the link to point to. To add a link to a file that is on your computer, type a "/" before the path. For example, suppose you wanted to create a link to the file, coffee.htm, which contains your favorite coffee recipes. You would type "/coffee.htm" in the URL box. If coffee.htm was in a Recipes folder, you would type "/Recipes/coffee.htm".
Repeat STEPS 2 and 3 for each link you want to add.
Your home page is updated automatically when you save new information. However, if your Web site is already open, choose Refresh from the Internet Explorer View menu so that you can see the updated information.

Notes

If you do not include the protocol in your links to external sites, Microsoft Personal Web Server will insert "http://" automatically.
The maximum number of links you can add through the Links page is seven. To add more, open your home page in a text or HTML editor and manually add them.

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URL basics

A Web server is basically a very simple program. It just waits for people on other computers to request files, and, when it receives such a request, delivers the right file.

A user must specify where a particular file is on the server's computer and the server must figure out what kind of information is in the file (text, images, movies, and so on), so that the browser knows what to do with it.

To specify where the file is on the server's computer, you use a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. A URL consists of a protocol, or method of access, in this case "http://", a computer's address (either a domain name, like "mycomputer.mycompany.com" or an IP address such as 123.456.789.12), and finally a path to the document. When you type a URL, the Internet browser brings you to a particular page on a Web site.

When you visit your Web site, you might discover that your URL is a number rather than a name. Why? Domain names are provided by special servers know as Domain Name Servers (DNS). When Personal Web Server starts up, it checks a DNS server to see if the computer has a name. If the DNS server provides a valid name for your computer, the Microsoft Personal Web Server displays this name in your URL. Otherwise, your URL contains your computer's IP address. (Personal Web Server may also display your IP address if your domain name is too long to be displayed in its control panel.) Some networks are configured to give your Macintosh a new IP address every time you connect to the network. If this is the case, your URL will change every time you start Personal Web Server because your URL is based on your computers address. If you find this bothersome, your Internet service provider may be able to provide a static IP address or domain name to remedy the problem.

Web servers handle a path by starting from a folder on your hard disk and following the specified path to arrive at a file. When you specify the "Personal Web Site folder" in the Microsoft Personal Web Server control panel, you are telling Personal Web Server where to start its URLs. The simplest URL is the one that goes to your site. For example:

http://yourcomputer.yourcompany.com/

In this case, Personal Web Server looks for a document called Default.htm in your My Personal Web Site folder. This means that to get to the same document, a user could also have typed:

http://yourcomputer.yourcompany.com/default.htm

To gain access to files in subfolders, you need to specify a longer path. For example, if you have a folder named Sales on your Web site and a document named Default.htm in that folder, to access the folder you would type:

http://yourcomputer.yourcompany.com/sales/

Because HTML was developed on UNIX-based computers, it does not handle characters such as spaces or percent signs as smoothly as your Macintosh. If your folders or the files in them contain such characters, they must be "escaped" or replaced with other characters so that the receiving computer can convert it. For example, a space is "escaped" with the characters %20 so that if you had a file named Sales report.htm in the sales folder, its URL would be:

http://yourcompany.com/sales/sales%20report.htm

Of course, the simplest solution is to use only letters and numbers in your Web serving folders and files.

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