Hyplan Information

"Hyplans" are personal web pages for users of the IU Computer Science systems. The name is a shortening of hypertext .plan, because they were originally seen as serving a similar functionality as .plan files with finger. IUCS users were some of the first on the Internet to have home pages available to them on the Web, and the name "hyplan" dates from then.

In order to set up a hyplan, simply run this command from the command prompt on any CS Linux or Sun system:

makehyplan

This will create your ~/.hyplan directory and a sample index.html file there (if one doesn't already exist), set up permissions, and make a symbolic links to the directory from /l/www/hyplan/your_username so it's part of the department web server document tree in /l/www. Once this is done, you can edit your ~/.hyplan/index.html file and you can put auxiliary and additional web files in your .hyplan directory to build a personal web site.

You are encouraged to run checkhyplan after setting up your hyplan to check for permission problems and broken links. You will also find answers to many common web and hyplan questions in the WWW Section of the CSG FAQ.

The global address for your hyplan which you can publish for others is

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~your_username/

The IUCS Personnel Directory also serves as an index to all the hyplans available. Your new hyplan will be listed in this directory starting the day after you first create it.

Watch those file permissions! The server runs as nobody (for security) and won't be able to serve your files unless the files are readable and the entire directory path to them is searchable. Also, be aware that symbolic links in the department web server document tree are restricted so that they're only effective for the server if the creator/owner of the link is the same as the owner of the file or directory they link to. So you should only create links to things you own. Symbolic links here with improper owners may be deleted. And, make sure the links will resolve properly on any CS machine.

If you have a web page on some other non-CS machine and you want your CS homepage to forward to this page just run:

makehyplan   -f

This will prompt you for the URL to which the CS homepage should be forwarded.

CGI's and PHP are also allowed for Faculty, Staff, and Graduate Students with a Sharkestra account. Read the CGI and PHP FAQ entries for instructions on how to implement them.

Also, if you create a file named .hyplan/resume.html or .hyplan/resume.txt in your $HOME directory, it will be linked in specially in the personnel directory alongside your hyplan. You can also create a file named .hyplan/resume.forward, instead, to refer your résumé listing to some another URL.