Personal Home Pages

people.bath.ac.uk is the domain for personal home pages; once you have created a home page, you can view it by typing https://people.bath.ac.uk/username/ (where username is your username) in the Address/Location box on your browser. Note that, although the old domain naming for student pages (ie http://www.bath.ac.uk/~username/) will continue to work, you should now be using people.bath.ac.uk/username/ whenever you quote your web address. Be sure to use the new address when creating links or referring people to your web page.

See the list of all personal home pages for a list of all staff and student home pages at the University.

As a registered user of the Computing Services, you can create and publish your own personal home page on the Web in your filespace on the Campus File Server; the simplest way to do this is to run the mkhome command on one of the UNIX servers - this creates a basic home page (ie name, postal address, phone & fax numbers and e-mail address) which will automatically be added to the list of all personal home pages the next day. You can edit your home page and view it by typing the address or URI (Uniform Resource Indicator) in the Address/Location box on your browser. If you have need to develop your site, eg for group project work, you may need to check your disk space quota and shared disk space.

The content and design of your personal home page area is up to you, but you must keep in mind that you are personally responsible for the content - you must ensure that you abide by University Regulations & the Acceptable Use Policy and conform to the guidelines for providers. In particular, your home page(s) must not:

• be used for illegal purposes
• include threatening, obscene, or harassing materials or be used to harm others
• be used for the benefit of third parties or for-profit activities without authorisation
• infringe the rights of other members of the university community
• create heavy network traffic that disrupts or interferes with the normal activities of the university community
• appropriate other people's intellectual property rights

If a user complains about the content of your pages you may be asked to remove the offending content and, if you do not comply, your page may be shut down permanently.

If you wish to remove your personal home page, simply remove or rename the public_html directory which is inside your home directory. Renaming public_html to anything else (for example public_html_disabled) is a good way to disable your site, as you can rename it back to public_html to reactivate your personal homepage whenever you wish.

Getting Help

If you have technical problems with your personal WWW pages, please use the Computing Services reporting a problem form. Please note however, that you are responsible for learning to write your own Web pages and support is not available for this. See the Web Publishing Guide for help on writing for the Web.

Remember:

• many people will visit your home page - be sure to include an e-mail option so that visitors can comment/provide feedback on your page.
• consider whether you want to include images of yourself or your home address/phone number on your home page - incidents of harrassment do occur.
• never include an image of someone else without their permission and knowledge.
• personal home pages remain on the system only while the provider is a registered user - if your home page proves popular (see Statistics for Personal Home pages), try to ensure that you provide a forwarding address or alternative web address when you leave the University.
• check your pages regularly to ensure that the information in them is up-to-date and that existing links are still valid.

Last update: June 2019