# www2.truman.edu: When Kirksville Students and Faculty Got Personal Web Space

Truman’s www2 personal Web-space system let students and faculty publish files from campus storage to public tilde-user URLs.

2026-07-06


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Before profiles were generated automatically by a university CMS, Truman students and faculty could have their own public Web directories.

The service used the familiar early-Web tilde-user pattern under **[www2.truman.edu](http://www2.truman.edu)**.

## The public address format

Truman ITS documentation gives the personal-site format as:

**[www2.truman.edu/~username](http://www2.truman.edu/~username)**

That pattern reflects a Unix-style personal Web-space tradition used by many universities.

Each user had a directory that could be exposed through a public URL.

## The T: drive connected campus storage to the Web

Truman documentation describes personal Web space as appearing through the campus **T: drive**.

A September 2000 AAUP newsletter explains the workflow in plain language:

- edit a file;
- save it to the T: drive;
- the result is a Web page.

That makes the storage architecture unusually concrete.

The public website was not an abstract cloud service.

It was directly connected to campus file storage.

## The default page controlled the homepage

Truman’s documentation lists standard index filenames such as:

- index.html;
- index.htm;
- index.php.

A default index file becomes the page shown when someone visits the directory URL without typing a filename.

That convention let a personal Web directory behave like a normal homepage.

## Users could choose different tools

Historical ITS documentation mentions several ways users could edit or maintain Web files, including:

- Netscape tools;
- Microsoft Word;
- FrontPage;
- later Web publishing tools.

The platform did not require one universal editor.

The important requirement was getting the files into the correct Web-accessible storage location.

## By 2000 the system was clearly active

The September 2000 AAUP newsletter publishes live examples under:

- a faculty personal tilde-user path;
- an AAUP path on www2.

That establishes the service as a functioning publishing environment by 2000.

Other records preserve academic pages under www2 from around the same period.

## What did people publish?

Personal Web space could support:

- faculty pages;
- course material;
- student projects;
- research resources;
- organization material;
- personal academic content.

The exact content varied because the point of the system was decentralized publishing.

## The launch date remains unresolved

The current research does not establish:

- first year of www2 service;
- earliest student personal page;
- earliest faculty tilde-user page;
- whether another hostname came first.

So 2000 should be treated as a strong documented-use checkpoint, not a launch date.

## Why this model mattered

The system gave ordinary campus users direct publication capability.

They did not need:

- a commercial host;
- a social-media account;
- a centralized institutional profile system.

They needed files, campus storage and enough technical knowledge to publish them correctly.

For the software side, see [FrontPage, Dreamweaver and Web Folders: The Tools Behind Kirksville’s Early Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/frontpage-dreamweaver-web-folders-kirksville-early-web).

A tilde URL looks primitive now.

At the time, it meant the University had handed you a piece of the public Web.

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Language: en-us

Content type: article

Published: 2026-07-06T08:46:09+00:00

Description: How Truman’s personal Web-space system worked, from the T: drive and default index files to public www2.truman.edu addresses.