Hosting a Website at Ryerson

There are several ways to host a website at Ryerson. Students may enable an account on the student web server. Faculty and staff may enable a web account on a separate server.

All full-time and part-time degree students are entitled to an account on Ryerson's Student Web Server, stw.ryerson.ca. Continuing Education students are granted access to the student web server if a course requires it. Department and faculty pages are located on a separate server, at www.ryerson.ca.

How to Get an Account on the Ryerson Student Web Server

Full-time Ryerson day students and part-time degree students are automatically entitled to a Ryerson Student Web Server (STW) account. So are Continuing Education students enrolled in courses requiring one. Accounts on the Student Web Server are subject to the same rules, regulations and usage guidelines applied to all user accounts. Ryerson's main web site, found at http://www.ryerson.ca/webpolicy.html, provides a web page policy.
In addition to the usual guidelines, a student's web page must:

• comply with all ONET regulations.
• not intend to advertise or help operate a private business.
• not present copyrighted material without the author's consent. When possible, copyrighted material should be linked to, not reproduced.
• comply with the equity and harassment policies of the university (http://www.ryerson.ca/equity/dhpspolicy).
• identify the individual responsible for maintaining the page and give the most recent revision date.

To get a Ryerson Student Web Server account, students must login to Portal, https://my.ryerson.ca and under the Manage My Online Resources - Self Serve heading, click on Manage My Online Resources: self serve, password change and resource requests. When in Self Serve, under the Manage Resources menu option, change the status of your STW account to “Requested”.

Student accounts on STW are allowed a maximum of 5 MB of disk storage. Because of problems with security and resource consumption, students cannot run private CGI programs on STW. Students requiring CGI access will need an account on Snapper.

Faculty and Staff-Specific Information

A Web style guide has been developed to aid faculty and staff in the creation of consistent and correctly branded Ryerson websites. In addition, the use of the university’s Content Management System (CMS) is recommended for those developing departmental/school sites within the Ryerson web domain. For further information contact University Advancement Web Services or visit: http://www.ryerson.ca/webservices/.

my.ryerson Web Portal

An alternative to publishing web pages on a public domain server such as www.ryerson.ca, is to use the my.ryerson Web Portal. The my.ryerson Web Portal enables the creation of secure web-based learning environments, facilitating a range of activities including online discussion, formative and summative assessment, and content delivery. The my.ryerson Web Portal can also be used for non-course related administrative purposes. Access to the my.ryerson Web Portal is restricted to the Ryerson community.

CCS supports faculty and staff in their use of the my.ryerson Web Portal. For more information, visit our dedicated my.ryerson support site at http://www.ryerson.ca/courses, or E-mail courses@ryerson.ca.

FAQ

1. How do I get an account for the Student Web Server?
   
   All full-time and part-time degree students are entitled to an account on Ryerson's Student Web Server. Continuing Education students are granted access to the student web server if a course requires it.
   
   For more information, see the Manage Resources section of this guide.
   
   
2. How do I upload files to my web account?
   
   Use SSH Secure File Transfer application when transferring your .html files to the Student Web Server. SSH Secure File Transfer is available in the Academic Computing labs as well as available for download at the CCS website (http://www.ryerson.ca/ccs). SSH is a secure client and it is highly recommended. Connect to the stw.ryerson.ca server and copy your files to the public_html directory.
   
   For more information on creating your own web site, see the Web Authoring section of this guide. For additional help on transferring files to the server using SSH Secure File Transfer, see Copying Files Between Computers section.
   
   
3. I created my own web site on the Ryerson Student Web Server. What is the URL?
   
   All student web pages are available on the stw.ryerson.ca server. Your URL would be: http://stw.ryerson.ca/~username where username is your my.ryerson short ID.
   
   
4. What is my URL, or address to access my website?
   
   Your URL would be http://stw.ryerson.ca/~myusername/myfile.html
   

   All user account web addresses are reached by appending the ~ symbol after the server name and then appending the users ID. In the example above, the file myfile.html will be retrieved from the public_html directory in the myuserid account.
   
   Please note that the first file you should create in your new directory (~myuserid) is index.html. Make sure you create it since it is the default web page displayed as the home page of any website. If you remove the index.html from your directory, all the files contained in that directory will be listed when the directory is accessed by a web browser.