8 - Providing User Personal Web Directories

Abstract

User web directories are commonly known as userdirs. This chapter focuses on user personal web directories, its advantages and disadvantages and its implementation in detail. In an educational environment, the use of personal directories is beneficial as it allows users to develop their own web content, take responsibility for it, organize the directories, and update directories whenever required. The system manager doesn't have to check the content of the users so as to avoid issues of censorship, quality standards, and browser compatibility. However, in a commercial environment using personal web directories is not that encouraging. It is important to consider additional security risks in user web directories. An alternative to userdirs, is to set up a user directory tree in web space that makes it easier to exercise some central management. An advantage of this structure over userdirs is that it's easier to automatically index the material in a user directory tree than in user space scattered over multiple trees.