For one reason or another, you’re probably going to take advantage of your personal Penn State Web Space at some point, if you haven’t already. This is a great resource that everyone should be utilizing, and, if you’re not, we’ll teach you how.

Get your personal Penn State Web Space

To start off, head over to this site to apply for your allocated space. When you’re done reading through the information, you’ll be given a short, easy quiz. You’ll need to answer four of the five questions correctly to proceed. Once you’re done with the quiz, a page will load saying that your request has been sent and will be processed shortly. You’ll be notified of this via email. Your page will be http://www.personal.psu.edu/xyz1234 (with xyz1234 being your personal user name).

e-Portfolio or Online Resume

If you want to use it as an online portfolio/resume, go Google “free eportfolio template,” “free online resume template,” etc., or you can use Penn State’s services. From these sites, you should be able to find some type of help to get you started with creating your website.

Learn How to Make a Website

Learning the basics of building a website would greatly help every college student as you probably will, at some point in your life, need to make one. If you want to learn how to make a website, I highly suggest checking out Lynda.com with access provided by Penn State ITS.

Lynda.com is a fantastic resource for anyone looking to learn anything computer-related. All types of software and media tutorials are available. With that Penn State technology fee from your tuition, you get free access to anything on this site, as long as you are a current student. I suggest learning to use Adobe’s Dreamweaver (currently CS5) as your main tool for web design. It really isn’t that complicated, even for beginners.

Uploading to Your Web Space

Once you’ve got your content (website, movies, files, etc.), it’s time to upload them to your web space so that you can access them via the Internet.

To upload files to your web space from on-campus computers, simply log in and open “My Computer.” From here, you’ll need to get into the (X:) drive, which is your PASS drive. In here is a “www” folder. Anything you put in this folder can be accessed by going to http://www.personal.psu.edu/xyz1234. You’ll need to put all of your files in this directory, as well as your “index.html” file, which is the first page that will be displayed when someone accesses your website.

From an off-campus machine, it can be a little trickier. I recommend that you look to this website for information on transferring files to and from your PASS space.

If you have more helpful resources for managing your Penn State web space, feel free to post them here in the comments section! Those of us who have done this know how frustrating it can be, so let’s make it easier for everyone else by sharing what we know.