Uploading Developed Pages to MyFiles

Motivation

As you construct sites using AutoNOTE you may find you wish to share your work with others, so that they can provide feedback as your site grows. You will have noticed that the site you are building is only available to the localhost (i.e. 127.0.0.1 - the computer you are working on), and cannot be viewed by anyone else, even those on your network. Without physically taking your computer to whomever you wish to show your site to, you are stuck…

There are multiple solutions to this problem, such as sharing the root files of your AutoNOTE project, however this requires those wishing to view your work to compile it on their own systems, which is not always practical or possible. Alternatively you could demonstrate your site over a Teams/Zoom call, but this isn’t entirely practical either.

From a useability standpoint, the best solution to this problem is to make your developed site available on the web, for anyone to view whenever they like. This allows stakeholders to get a true feeling of the experience and layout of your site and provide comment/recommendations as you work.

Setup Instructions

Enabling your University Personal Home Page

The previously linked guide states that to enable your university home page, you must:

...run the mkhome command on one of the UNIX servers...

Connecting you a University UNIX Server

A comprehensive guide on how to connect to the University’s UNIX servers (for Windows, Mac and Linux users) can be found here.

Ensure you are either on campus, or connected to the University VPN for this step, otherwise it will not work.

As suggested by the guide, once you have connected to the University’s UNIX server, open terminal and run the mkhome command.

You will then be asked a series of questions that will inform the content to be placed on default home page for you.

Once completed, you should be able to view your personal home page at https://people.bath.ac.uk/<username>/, where <username> is replaced with your university username.

Once you have done this successfully, it will persist for the remainder of your time at the University of Bath. You won't need to complete these steps again.

Adding your AutoNOTE Site to your University Home Page

Connecting to the University File Space

To add/edit content on your University home page, you need to access your university file space, also known as the H: drive. You can either do this using a web portal known as files.bath, or you can link (a.k.a. map) your university file space to your computers network drives.

To map your network drives, you must either be on campus or connect to the University VPN. You can then follow these guides, for Mac OS X, Windows 7 or Windows 10.

These network drives will disconnect whenever you leave campus or the University VPN system. You will need to reconnect them when you subsequently need to use them again.

Once connected, you can copy the contents of the _site folder within your AutoNOTE project to the public_html folder within your H: drive.

Once this has completed, your AutoNOTE site will be visible at https://people.bath.ac.uk/<username>/, where <username> is replaced with your university username.

Each time you make changes to your AutoNOTE site, you will need to copy (and overwrite) the _site directory to the public_html directory for the updates to show on the web.

Lets Talk About Version Control

It’s also good practice to use a version control system to help you keep track of changes you make to your AutoNOTE project. This will allow you to roll-back any catastrophic mistakes you may make and share you work with others, which will invariably be necessary.

It is recommended you use Git for this purpose. The University of Bath has it’s own GitHub site where you can store your work. This will also enable work you do to be merged with other projects.

If you haven’t used Git before, there are numerous guides online. They will not be reproduced here.