Using the W: Drive

The W:drive is an area on the College server where staff and students can post web pages. Like this one, but perhaps more attractive.

Creating a web page
Publishing your web page to the WWW
Accessing your web page
Adding pictures and other formatting

Anyone can access their portion of the W:drive if they are on campus or if they are at home connecting to college via a VPN (Virtual Private Network). For information on how to set up one of these, which is very simple, see this page

http://www.rhul.ac.uk/information-services/computer-centre/faqs/full.asp?ref=64&type=Dial-Up

You can create web pages and save them in the W:Drive and they will be available for students to look at online. This could be very useful if we want to start making available on the web

I have put up a page for my popular music course of annotated musical theatre links, so students can go to my page and navigate from there.

Of course, you may also want to put up texts of conference papers, long-unavailable articles, reviews, or even just personal pages.

Here's a short guide on how to create, publish, and access personal web pages.

Creating a webpage

It’s very easy to create a webpage, especially if it’s just text-based, like posting essay questions. In Word, once you’ve created the file, just save it as an HTML document. To do this

  1. click on 'Save As' (File > Save As). This will bring up the 'Save as' dialogue box.
  2. Choose a filename and type it in the 'File name' box. (NB. don't put any spaces in the filename)
  3. Find the ‘Save as type’ box at the bottom of the window, and select the option 'HTML document'.
  4. Click 'Save' and the document is now saved as a web page.

Publishing your web page to the WWW

Once you have saved your web page, you simply copy it to your subdirectory on the W:drive.

To do this

  1. Open Windows Explorer and find the file.
  2. Right click on it and select 'Copy'.
  3. Then look at the directory tree: you should see, towards the bottom of it 'Home_Pages on ‘Pfs2’ (W:)’. Double click on it. It may take a short while for the subdirectories to come up.
  4. Then from the hundreds of subdirectories, find the first four letters of your username. My username is uhwe010, so I’d look for ‘uhwe’. Click on that.
  5. Then search for the number at the end of your username. (Mine would be 010).
  6. Right click on that and select 'paste'.
  7. Your page is now published to the Web.

Accessing your web page

Once you have saved your page it is now available online for anyone to view. The address will be:

http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/username letters/username numbers/filename.htm

or example, my musical theatre links page was saved as

and it’s available at

Adding pictures and other formatting

HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) is extremely simple. It's the code that standardly generates web pages; you can see what it looks like by right-clicking on this page and choosing 'View Source'. This will bring up a box that resembles the 'view codes' window in WordPerfect, if any of you remember that!

To edit your HTML, you 'view source' for your page and type in that window.

To add a picture, just copy it straight to the W:Drive (again changing spaces to underscores). Don't change the suffix. Then in you 'view source' window you type in

e.g

The sky's the limit with formatting matters, but there are plenty of websites that give you tips on HTML programming. I've found these particularly useful:

There are also hundreds of books around. I really liked the tone and style of

The other thing to remember is that you can nick HTML code off any site you like; just 'view source' and you can cut and paste their codes. Just remember that HTML works with pairs of codes, one that turns the code on and one that turns it off. As long as you keep everything paired, you should be fine.

Good luck!

Dan