Personal Web Space

Mills College provides all students, faculty, and staff with free personal web space. You get your own web address and you can create a personal website that can be viewed by anyone on the Internet. Feel free to display your creativity and share with your friends, family, and the world. Web pages created by Mills community members have included creative work (writing, music, art, photography) as well as essays and academic papers.

Show off your web pages, but remember that material on your web pages should not violate the Mills College Computing Agreement or federal, state or local laws. Your pages are not part of the official Mills website and must contain a disclaimer to that effect.

Personal web pages are found at http://people.mills.edu. When you go to that URL, you will see links to students, staff, and faculty directories of all persons who have requested a web page. In many cases, these pages are still blank because their owners have not added any content to their web pages.

Requesting Personal Web Space

The first step is to request a personal homepage. If you haven't done it yet, use the Request a Personal Web Page form. You will be notified by email after a blank homepage has been created for you.  Your name will also appear on the people.mills.edu directory page.

Your Personal Web Address

Your homepage will have the following web address: people.mills.edu/username, where 'username' stands for your Mills login name. For example, if your login name is smills, your personal web page URL will be: http://people.mills.edu/smills.

How Much Space do You Get?

Your web space is part of the personal storage space that all members of the Mills community are granted on MyFiles, one of our network servers. You can use this space to store files, such as papers and projects you are working on. The contents of MyFiles are backed up each night; if your data is accidentally deleted, an earlier version can still be retrieved.

Everyone starts off with 20 megabytes of storage, though if you need more, this can be increased, up to a maximum of 100 megabytes.

Adding Content to Your Site

A personal website is made up of one or more files. These can range from basic html to images and wordprocessing documents. The filename of your homepage is index.html. Your web pages and related files, starting with the index.html file, are stored within the folder called 'mywebpages' in your myfiles home directory.

On the Mills website, there are instructions on how to connect to the MyFiles server from on or off campus. Choose the link that you need from this page.

All files related to your web pages (html, images, sound files) must be placed in your 'mywebpages' folder. You may begin editing your index.html file and creating new web pages at any time.

You cannot use cgi scripts in your website. However php is available for use in your web pages.

Be Careful

Do NOT rename your index.html unless you want it to disappear from the Mills web site.

DO NOT remove or alter the text of the disclaimer at the bottom of your index.html file. Only homepages that are named index.html AND contain the entire, unaltered text of the disclaimer will be linked and available through the Mills College People website.

Web Page Editing Help

For an introduction to understanding basic HTML, do a web search for primers and tutorials to HTML. 

For those familiar with UNIX tools

The server is myfiles.mills.edu. We recommend SSH access to the myfiles server.

When you open an SSH session to myfiles, you will automatically be taken to your home directory.

To explore the contents of your mywebpages directory, SSH to myfiles.mills.edu, then type these commands at the prompt:

    cd mywebpages
    ls -la

Both the vi and pico editors are available to create or edit your webpages.

For assistance, please contact the Information Technology HelpDesk at 510.430.2005, email helpdesk@mills.edu, or submit a request at helpdesk.mills.edu.