This project is intended to introduce you to your classmates and the course staff. It is also a lesson in following directions precisely.
Every student is given a NetID, which correspondes to an account on acpub, the public Unix clusters. If you are a new student, your NetID and password should have been mailed to you. If you have been here awhile and do not know your ID, you can get it by visiting the Office of Information Technology, OIT, on the first floor of the North Building. The book Introduction to the Public Unix Clusters at Duke explains how to login, send mail, and read newsgroups.
Creating your Web page
For this course, you will create a web page that represents a portfolio of your projects. The course staff may use this page to track your progress throughout the course, so it is very important that you keep it up-to-date. Whether or not you already have a personal home page, you should create a separate page for this course.To create the content for your web page, you can use the editor that comes with the Netscape or Internet Explorer browser or a standard modern word processor. These editors allow you write text or import images without worrying about the actual format used on the web. Even though it is not necessary for this assignment, if you would like to learn more about the hypertext markup language, HTML, you can look at a tutorial online here.
Your homepage must contain at least the following information:
 | your name |
| where you are from |
| your computer science autobiography (see below) |
| a link to the CompSci 6 homepage |
| your nickname |
| your hobbies |
| your year |
| other courses you are taking |
| your two or three favorite web pages |
For more help on creating a web page, OIT has created a Duke-specific tutorial online here. For those having trouble being creative, you can fill in the template file here.
Computer Science Autobiography
Since computers are now so pervasive in society, everyone should have a variety of experiences using or programming them (or being victims of software). Before you start this course, you should take a moment to reflect on how these experiences have affected you and shaped your decision to program (and to take this course).
Your autobiography should attempt to answer the following questions:
| When did you first start using a computer? |
| What kinds of computers have you used? |
| What event(s) made you interested in studying computer science? |
| What do you think a computer scientist does on a daily basis? |
| What kinds of programs are you interested in writing? |
| How do you see yourself using computers in the future? |
Saving your Web Page
In order to view your web page on the World Wide Web, WWW, you must save it in a specific format and specific place in your acpub account. You can save it temporarily on the computers in the classroom or on your home computer. Note, files stored on the classroom machines are local to that machine only and may be deleted at the end of each week.
When you save your web page from your word processor, you must choose the option Save as HTML. In some word processors, this options is available directly within the File menu, on others it is an option within the dialog box that appears when you select the Save As option within the File menu. If you are using the editor within Netscape's browser, you do not need to worry about this complication since it is saved as HTML by default; simply save your web page. You must save your web page in a file called index.html (why will be explained later).
Once you have properly saved your web page, you need to transfer it from the machine you happen to be working on currently to your acpub account. To put it in the right place, you need to do the following:
- connect to your acpub account
- select the folder public_html; it should already exist within your acpub home folder (if not, you can create it)
- create a folder named cps6 within your public_html folder
- select the folder cps6 that you just created
- transfer the file named index.html (and any additional images or backgrounds you included) into the current folder
Note, your web page must be named index.html and must be located in a folder named cps6 within your public_html folder. If you have done everything correctly, you (and anyone else in the world) can now view your course web page by going to
http://www.duke.edu/~your_NetID/cps6/
where your_NetID should be replaced with your NetID. Note the ~ character in front of your NetID.
