Setting Up Your Personal Home Page

WITS has some documentation on activating your personal home page - it involves some quite low level operations (namely telneting into hydra, a university machine) but is actually fairly straightforward. Simply press Start -> Run and type 'telnet hydra.willamette.edu' and follow from step 2 on. If you have any trouble, you can stop by the WITS Help Desk and they can activate it for you.

Personal Home Page For Power Users

For most people, making some HTML pages in Dreamweaver is all they need - but if you want more out of your personal home page, there's actually quite a lot you can do with it. Most notably, it can run PHP files! There are however a few limitations and tweaks you should know about.

First off, and most notably (and irritatingly) all PHP errors are suppressed and not displayed. This means that if there's any kind of non-fatal error, you won't see it, and if there's a fatal error, you'll just get a blank screen. I have so far been unable to find a way around this, but anyone who figures it out, please share!

PHP Includes are also funky - since the files are not actually on the webserver, but on a completely different machine (dante). Therefore to properly include files, you either have to use relative paths (untrustworthy) or uncover the actual path to the files - which I did. To use PHP Includes, place the following at the beginning of every line:

Now to include simply prepped 'PUBLIC_HTML_PATH.' (without the quotes) to the files you want to include, and you're good to go.

What if you want to use a database backend? Now we're getting into slightly tricksy ground, but it's still completely possible. You'll need another server, such as a web host, with MySQL installed on it, and you configure it to allow requests from the Willamette web server, and when you create the MySQL connection in PHP, just change the host to the other server.