Meteorology 301 - Lab 1

Introduction

GOAL: Create your personal Web page on the meteorology computers.

Instructions

1. Launch a World Wide Web browser from your machine. How you do this will depend on what computer you are on.

• Meteorology linux computers:
  Either click on the web browser icon (if it is visible along the bottom of the screen)
  -- or --
  open a terminal window, as described in Accessing Meteorology Computers, and enter netscape &

• SGI:
  Click on "Desktop" in the Desk1 menu to open a further menu. Then click on "Unix Shell", which opens a new window. In this window, enter
  netscape &

• PC:
  Click on the Netscape icon.

2. Go to the ISU Geological & Atmospheric Sciences Department homepage at the URL (universal resource locator)
http://www.ge-at.iastate.edu/

3. In sequence, select "Courses", "Meteorology" and then "Meteorology 301".

4. Scan through the courses homepage, paying special attention to the sections "Student Portfolios" and "Procedure for Computer/Math Labs".

5. Click on "lab list" in the Labs paragraph, then follow the link to "Lab 1", where you will see a copy of this lab.

6. Follow instructions according to your major:

• If you are a Meteorology major, you should create a personal web page on the Meteorology computers.
  1. Following instructions in Accessing Meteorology Computers, login to the Meteorology linux computers and open a terminal window.
  2. In this window, type in
     mkdir WWW
     and push the return key. This command creates a directory in your user space called "WWW".
  3. Copy a file from my Meteorology 301 space into your WWW directory:

     cp /mthome/gutowski/MT301/index.html WWW/
     

     Note that there are blank spaces between "cp" and "/mthome" and between "html" and "WWW/".
  4. The last two commands together create a web page for you that will have the URL

     http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~username
     

     where "username" in the address is your Project Vincent username. For example, my web page URL is

     http://www.meteor.iastate.edu/~gutowski
     

• If you are not a Meteorology major, you have two options:
  1. If you do not have a personal web page, you should create one. The simplest way for now is to follow the steps for Meteorology majors above. However, you can also create a web page on Project Vincent (see Prof. Gutowski for details).
  2. If you already have a personal web page, you can use that for this course, which will make only minimal intrusion into it. However, you should still create the WWW directory, following the instructions for Meteorology majors.

7. At this point, you have created your personal web page. You can look at it using the URL given to you in the creation procedure. However, you will need to edit it to make changes. In particular, we will eventually connect it to your Student Portfolio page, through a feature known as a link

8. Spend some time learning about

• some basic unix/linux procedures.

  You will need to know these for next week's lab, when you will establish your initial Student Portfolio page.

• Hypertext Markup Language.

  World Wide Web pages are written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). There are many good online guides to using HTML, such as the Beginner's Guide to HTML. Many national search engines have "WWW," "Web" or "Internet" sections, with a variety of HTML guides.

• some tools and utilities available through Iowa State (e.g, imagemaps, feedback forms, statcounter and other useful web tools)

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