All Exit109 dialup and shell accounts include 5 megs of disk space on our system which you can use for a personal web page. Additional space is available for $1 per megabyte per month and must be requested in advance.

To create a web page, you first must create your HTML documents. You can use any HTML editing program, many of which can be found at Tucows download sites. Netscape also supplies a web page editor with the Gold version of their browser.

You might also want to check out the NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML. A lot of information can also be found at W3C. If you are interested in designing a home page, we recommend you read these documents.

If you are really interested in learning about HTML and web page design, check out the books from O'Reilly, publisher of some of the best computer-related books out there, including many on web design.

Once you have your pages created, you have to upload them to our server along with any graphics or other associated files they require. You place your web files in a directory called public_html in your Unix account on our server (hiway1.exit109.com). Make sure you put them in the public_html directory; files in your top-level home directory cannot be accessed from the web!

You can upload your files using an FTP file transfer program. For Windows, the most popular FTP program is WS_FTP from Ipswitch, available here. We have some specific instructions for uploading files with WS_FTP. The program itself is included on our software CD-ROM, and is also available for download from our Download Software page.

When you log into the system using an FTP program, change your current remote directory to public_html. (The full pathname, in case you are using a program which needs it, is /u/home/username/public_html, where username is replaced with your username.) Then just upload your files.

For more information on creating pages for Exit109's system can be found on our Web Page Developer Notes page.

When you create your HTML files there are several important things you must take into consideration. Our web server is a Unix system. Unlike Windows or the Macintosh, Unix filenames are case-sensitive. So, filename.html is different from filename.html or FILENAME.HTML. If the links in your HTML files are not exactly the name of the files they are referencing, including case, they will not work. Some HTML editing programs, such as Netscape Gold and Microsoft Frontpage, do not always take this into consideration. If your links don't work or your inline images don't show up this is probably the reason.

Also, some Windows programs, in particular 16-bit programs designed for Windows 3.1, do not recognize Windows 95's long filenames. If you use an FTP program like this, such as the 16-bit version of WS_FTP, it will change your filenames to the short, DOS versions, like mypict~1.htm instead of mypicture.html. Obviously this will cause problems for any links to that file in your HTML documents. So pay attention to what the filenames end up being on the server after you upload them.

If you are using Windows 95 or a Macintosh, you can have spaces in your filenames. Don't do this. Although Unix allows spaces in filenames, they are not a good idea because web addresses cannot include spaces without special encoding, and spaces can confuse some web servers and most browsers. Always avoid special characters in your filenames, such as spaces, punctuation characters, etc.

Your HTML files can use either .htm or .html extensions. The web server knows about both naming conventions.

Once your files are uploaded, they can be accessed on the web with the address http://www.exit109.com/~username, where username is replaced with your username on our system. Accessing a page in this manner will bring up the HTML document called index.html (or index.htm). If your main page doesn't have this name, visitors must also enter the name of the file, for example http://www.exit109.com/~username/mypage.html.

Once your page is up and running, you can add it to the Exit109 User Home Page Directory.

Please note that personal web space may not be used for a commercial web site. Also, personal accounts do not have access to write CGI programs, though there are a few preinstalled CGI programs you can use from your pages such as a hit counter and an email form. We have instructions for using these in our Web Page Developer's Notes.

Otherwise, we don't care about the content of your site, provided it is legal, but we do reserve the right to limit the traffic it generates, should it start causing too much load on our web server.

Once your page is complete, feel free to add it to our list of User Homepages.