How To
How to shorten your web page URL to
March 00
What
If you’re frequently called upon to provide your web-page URL and you want to use the URL for your top-level Fuqua web page, you’d probably like to provide the shortest and most simple URL you can. That is, a URL that looks something like:
instead of:
Background
Fuqua maintains your top-level faculty web page on the external Fuqua web site. You provide the information for this page, but you can’t change it directly yourself (although you can certainly request that changes, updates, additions, etc. be made to it). This top-level page is intended to be a sort of gateway to any other information you want to provide about yourself on Fuqua’s external web site. This is the page that has the long, Fuqua-oriented URL. It would be an appropriate page to use for the shorter, Duke-type URL.
Steps
These steps assume you’re using Netscape as your browser and that you know how to use an FTP program such as Winsock_FTP.
- Create a Text File
In this step, you’ll create a text file that contains HTML code that points to your top-level Fuqua faculty web page (the code that you need to include follows).
You can create your text file by entering text into the HTML window of a web editor like DreamWeaver, or by using an application like NotePad or MS Word. If you use a tool like Word, be sure that when you save your file you save it as a text file and not in MS Word format.
Below is the text to include in your file:
The URL in the code is theURL for your Fuqua top-level faculty page. In your version of this file, replace the email-id portion of the URL in the code with your own e-mail ID. It’s important to note that you can not use an e-mail alias here. Also note that you want to include just the ID, not your complete e-mail address. For example, if your e-mail address were , the modified line from the code above would read like this:
URL=
- Name Your File
When you have the code entered properly, save your file with the name index.html. “Index” is a key file name because in the absence of any other specified file in a URL any existing file at that URL location with the name Index will be displayed by default. And “html” is the extension required by Duke’s web server. (Fuqua’s web server recognizes either .htm or .html as valid web page file extensions).
- FTP Your File
FTP your index.html file to the Duke web server. The Duke web server name is godzilla.acpub.duke.edu. Locate your index.html file in the public_html folder in your account on the godzilla system.
Your New URL
Once you’ve completed these steps, this short URL will display your Fuqua page, with links intact:
where ~yourid is your Duke email id (no alias!). Of course, test to make sure your page looks and works as you expect.
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