URLs for personal web sites on web.mit.edu

Everyone who gets an Athena account at MIT also has a subdirectory, www, their account which they can use to publish their personal web site. People who have been at MIT since before the evolution of the world wide web will not have a www subdirectory however they can easily create one in their Athena account.

In some cases, people have used their personal site to publish MIT-specific information, e.g., course material, research information.

Due to how the web servers have evolved at MIT and and how Athena accounts are set up, the following rules apply to how URLs work for personal web sites on web.mit.edu

• When going to http://web.mit.edu/user, you get top level of locker, when you go to http://www.mit.edu/~user you get the web site.
• If you go to http://web.mit.edu/~user, web.mit.edu ignores the ~.
• If you go to http://www.mit.edu/user you get a file not found error.