Before you start working about how to get your files somewhere they can be seen, you need to apply for a CS account. You can visit "https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/info/services/account_request" to obtain a CS account. This will provide you with access to the Linux machines in the MacLab on the A Level of the Regenstein Library.
There are two programs you can use to upload your work to a CS machine, and both are in the dock on any of the Macs in the MacLab. Fugu is probably the most user-friendly program of the two (the other being MacSFTP Carbon), and as such this guide will cover only Fugu. Use of MacSFTP Carbon is similar, so you should be able to use that as well, if necessary. You can download Fugu from: rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/
In addition, you can use a program called SubEthaEdit to create and write your html files on the Mac before uploading them to a CS machine. SubEthaEdit is on the Dock, and will automatically color html tags, which makes editing html files a lot easier.
When you first open Fugu, you'll be presented with a screen that looks something like this:
Under the "Connect to:" field, you should fill in the name of CS computer you would like to connect to. The CS Dept provides a list of machines you can connect to here (explicit). Some convenient names are the-400.cs.uchicago.edu, montrealer.cs.uchicago.edu and sail.cs.uchicago.edu. Fill in Username with the name of your CS account (usually your CNETID), and leave port and directory blank. Hit connect, and you'll be prompted for your password. Enter this, and you'll see Fugu change to this:
You'll see there are two panes. The left pane lists files in a default directory on your local computer. On the right is a listing of files in your home directory on the computer you just logged into. Chances are, if you just signed up for your CS account, you won't have nearly as much junk in your directory. Over the left pane there is a bar that says "Sesquis", which will read with whatever your username on your local machine is. Click that to change your local directory to locate the files you want to upload. Just drag the files over to the right pane (remote computer), and you'll see the files appear!
There is a free little program that works perfectly in Windows called WinSCP, and is available at winscp.net. On starting WinSCP, you should see something like this:
Once again, in Windows, fill in "Host name" with the name of the computer you wish to connect to. In this case I'm using "montrealer.cs.uchicago.edu". User name and password are self-explanatory, and once these are filled in, feel free to to hit Login. After logging in, you'll see this:
Just as with Fugu on the Mac, you can see that the left pane shows files on your current computer, while the right pane shows files on the remote computer. Copying files over is as simple as dragging them over.
The CS machines where your work should eventually end up are all in the MacLab. So, it kind of makes sense to just use those machines. Then you don't worry about having to transfer your files and all that. However, Linux can be fairly daunting to people who haven't had too much experience with it.
When you log in with your fresh CS account, you should eventually arrive at a screen that looks something like this:
You can see which icon I clicked to open a graphical file manager. This lists files and folders in your default user directory. If you'll note, I already have a "html" directory in the bottom right of the file manager.
You can create a new folder in much the same way as in Windows, either by right-clicking on empty space in the file manager and choosing New Folder, or by using File->New Folder. Once you've created a new folder, you can set its permissions by right-clicking on it, and choosing Properties. You'll see this show up:
Take note of the checks on the Owner, Group, Others lines. That's what yours should look like to have everything set up to be viewable over the Net.
Finally, to create files, just click the Applications menus in the top left corner of the screen, and browse to Editors. The most user-friendly would likely be XEmacs, or maybe even just GEdit, since they have graphical menus.
.tar files are just like .zip files. They are compressed archives of files. In Mac OS X, you should be able to just double click on the files in Finder, and have them automatically uncompressed. In Windows, Winzip (www.winzip.com) should be able to handle these. Alternatively, you can try other commercial extractors like WinACE or WinRAR.
If you are using a default setup on the Linux machines (if you do not know what this means, then you are), you might be able to automatically extract the files by double-clicking in the file manager. If this doesn't work, however, then you'll have to do it from the command line. Open a terminal (it is the screen icon on the top bar). Locate the file you need to untar by using "cd" to change directories, and "ls" to list the contents of the current directory. The command to extract the files in a .tar archive is "tar -xf file". "-xf" are options passed to the command "tar", and "x" indicates that tar should extract the archive, and "f" indicates that a file should be read.
Your files are now on the appropriate machines, but may not be set up to be viewed in a browser. Files on the CS machines are set up with permissions that prevent other people from accessing your work. For the web, though, you need to make certain files both readable and executable. In Unix, the permissions for this is 755. You don't really need to know the how or why of this magic number, but if you're curious, go ahead and google unix permissions.
What this means, however, is that you need to change the permissions of the files you've uploaded (or created locally, if you're sitting at a linux computer). The unix command for this is "chmod 755 foo", where "foo" is the name of the file. You can also do "chmod 755 *.html", which will change the permissions for every file that ends with ".html".
To move your files to a different directory that you have already created, then you need use the "mv" command. You can do something like this: "mv filename directory". Be careful how you use mv, though, because you can also rename files. If you do "mv file1 file2", where "file2" is not a directory, then you're renaming file1 to file2.
Note that in order for things to be viewable, you need to put your .html files in a directory named "html". Your "html" directory must be in your default user directory. To ensure that you're creating the html directory there, first type "cd ~/", then create your html directory with "mkdir html". You can also use "mkdir -m 755 html" to both create the directory and set the permissions.
Finally, just experiment. As long as you keep backups of your work, you'll never really be able to take down one of the CS machines unless you do something very, very special.