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Personal homepage with ETH Layout

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:35:57 +0100

One possible way to have a personal homepage at the Department of Mathematics with a corporate design is described below.

Configuration

Open a terminal (for MacOS: Menu > Finder > Go > Utilities > Terminal) on a computer of D-MATH or on your private computer connected with VPN and login for instance on ion-4 i.e.:

$ ssh ion-4
# or
$ ssh your-eth-username@ion-4

Afterwards execute the following command:

$ create-personal-homepage

Now you should have the following files in your www-folder:

Personal homepage

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 09:28:24 +0100

Read this blog for an alternative solution to create a personal homepage with corporate design. If you instead want a personal homepage with “full control”, read below.

General information

The URL (address) of your homepage is/will be the following:

https://people.math.ethz.ch/~username

The main file that you need has to be called index.html. You will probably have some more files like images, CSS-files, PDF-files, etc. You have to put all these files in your www-folder on the server.

How to Protect a Webpage with a Password

Wed, 17 May 2023 10:40:06 +0200

Suppose you want to protect the sub-page “secure” of your homepage with a password; that is, you want the visitors to be asked for a username and a password when accessing a webpage:

https://people.math.ethz.ch/~USERNAME/secure/

To do that you first have to create the directory “secure” with the correct permissions:

mkdir ~/www/secure
chmod 755 ~/www/secure

Then you have to create a kind of configuration file in that directory, named .htaccess with the following content (you can use emacs, xemacs, vi, … as editor)