Adding your page to Phred's homepage listing

If you have an account on phred.org you can add your homepage to phred's listing of user pages automatically. There are two ways to do this, depending on the location of your page.

To make a page on www.phred.org

Make a directory called "www" under your home directory on phred. You can do this with the command "cd; mkdir www". Go into that directory "cd www" and make a file called "index.html" with your favorite editor (pico, emacs, and vi are all available, with pico being the easiest to use). This will become your homepage and will automatically be added to the listing. The URL for the page will be "http://www.phred.org/~<userid>/" where <userid> is your account name on phred.

If you have never used HTML before you might find the following pages helpful:

The HTML Primer: This contains a lot of useful information for writing your first page in HTML. While it doesn't contain any information on using the HTML 3.0 extensions and Netscape extensions it is a good way to learn the basics of HTML document creation.
The Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0 HTML Reference: This contains a complete list of the HTML tags supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer (most of which are supported by Netscape as well). Its a great reference once you know HTML and just want to figure out what a few codes mean. This is the best HTML reference I've seen on the web; if anyone else knows of a better one send me email.
Netscape Extensions to HTML 2.0: This is Netscape's list of their extensions to HTML 2.0. It contains information on adding background patterns, tables, and dynamic document updating.
Extensions to HTML 3.0: Additional Netscape extensions to HTML 3.0 (used in Netscape 2.0). Note that you might not want to use many of the extensions found here until Netscape 2.0 becomes more widely used and the extensions are ported to other browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Guides to Writing HTML Documents: A good hotlist of HTML resources around the Web. Examples, style guides, Netiquette, and more.
The Color Page: This page has a script that will allow you to see how different colors look on a page. Its the best thing I've seen on the web for playing with colors.

The WWW Color Index

Want to change the text colors on your page and don't know what those #ff00ff things mean in real life? Take a look at this page, it presents a lot of colors and the codes that represent them.

To make a link to a page on another server

Make a file called ".html.homepage" in your home directory with the URL for your homepage. For instance if you have a page on CMU's Andrew Contributed server you could put "http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/usr/<afsuserid>/index.html" in the file ".html.homepage".

When is the phred homepage listing created?

The phred user home page listing is created every night at 2am Eastern time.

How does phred figure out what email address to use?

Phred uses your local email address (<userid>@phred.org) if you don't have your mail forwarded to another machine (through the use of a .forward file in your home directory). If you mail is forwarded phred will list that email address.

How can I add a counter to my homepage

To see an example of what I mean by a counter take a look at the bottom of http://www.phred.org/ where it says how many times the page has been accessed.

Adding a counter to your page is easy. Just add the statement

<!--#exec cgi="/cgi-bin/counter.pl"-->

to your web page where you want the counter to appear.

Note that the counter may be slightly incorrect for one day until the counter list is brought back up to date (this happens around 2am every morning). The numbers are updated from the statistics created by <-- Go back phred.org user's page

alex@phred.org