Yoyo's Home page Help  Users   GAUNIX  Links
Logs  Groups  Search Humour


Customizing your /users/ entries

The /users/ pages are generated automatically by a program which is run once a day. This program checks for every user who has a directory called public_html in their home directory. This directory must be world readable and executable. Links are added to the /users/ files for every user who meets the above criteria.

Two files in the user's public_html directory allow slight customization of the entry in the /users/ files. These are described below.

Messages After Your Name

If you have a file public_html/.message, the first line (and only the first line) in it will be appended to your entry in the /users/ files. This may contain a short description of what your home page contains.

Remember that if you put any relative links in this file, they will be taken relative to the /users/ directory, not relative to your home page or the root directory. Thus you need to use a link of the form:

  <a href="/~username/file.html">
rather then:
  <a href="file.html">
The second form will be expanded to be:
  <a href="http://yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au/users/file.html">

If you wish to use any data characters which are used for markup in html (such as '<' or '>'), you must use the corresponding entity names. For example, use '&lt;' for '<' and '&gt;' for '>'.

There are some special tags which will be stripped out before your public_html/.message file is added to the /users/ files. These include <blink>, <p>, the header tags (ie <h1> etc) and <font>. The idea of the public_html/.message file is to allow a short description of what is contained on your home page. It is not provided for people to express their creativity or try and out do each other in having the most appealing entry - that's what your home page is for. Animated gifs should not be included, and javascript and java applets are not allowed.

Note: Do not abuse this feature or it will be removed. Large inline images (ie. images larger than 16x16 pixels) should be avoided - don't rely upon setting the width and height options using Netscape's extensions to the img tag as most browsers do not recognize them. All text should be in good taste. Messages longer than one line (as rendered on standard browsers) should be avoided.

Link to a Home Page Located Elsewhere

Many users who have their main home page on another server and simply have a link from the page on yoyo's server, may wish to take advantage of this feature. It allows you to specify the url which you wish to appear linking to your home page.

Create the file public_html/.redirect and put the url you wish to appear on the first line. This url will then be used for the link to your home page.

This feature will also be useful if you don't wish to call your home page public_html/index.html, but maybe your username, for example if your username is "me", public_html/me.html. Then you would put the following in the file public_html/.redirect:


Previewing your entry

You may now preview your entry using the following form. Please use this facility to ensure that your entry is correct.

Enter the username whose entry you wish to preview:


© WWW Group / www@yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au
Last Modified Tue 15 Dec 1998