The HTTP servers that are run at Steward Observatory by the CSG allow individual users to set up their own HTTP-accessible directories. This is recommended as a replacement for public FTP, which is generally no longer supported at Steward.
To make files HTTP-accessible is to create a directory called public_html in your login directory. If you have a file in this directory called blah.html and your user name is user, it can be accessed via the URL
http://HOSTNAME/~user/blah.html
where HOSTNAME is the address for your home machine. You must use your home machine's name. Using as.arizona.edu or www.as.arizona.edu will NOT work. The URL
http://HOSTNAME/~user/
will automatically look for and load, if it exists, a file called index.html in your public_html directory. Naming your home page index.html or linking it to a file of that name is the preferred way of specifying your home page.
Symbolic links can be followed outside of your public_html directory. For example, if you have a Postscript file of a paper located in
/home/user/text/papers/paper.ps
you can make a link to it in your public_html directory so that others can look at it using the following command:
ln -s /home/user/text/papers/paper.ps /home/user/public_html/paper.ps
It can then be accessed via the URL
http://HOSTNAME/~user/paper.ps
Also, you can compress files and they will be uncompressed on the fly by most WWW browers such as Mosaic and Netscape.
The best way to learn HTML is probably to use the "View Source..." option on your WWW browser. This option shows you the raw HTML source code of the document you are viewing. There are also a number of resources on the Web devoted to composing HTML files. Here are a few good starting points:
Feel free to poke around other Stewardites' HTML directories, for more hints and examples. If you have a page that would be appropriate for inclusion into the Steward home page, please email the maintainer(s) of the Steward Web pages.