NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows User's Guide

Specifying your Home Page

Many organizations, including NCSA and possibly the organization you work for, maintain home pages. These are HTML documents that usually introduce the organization and provide a gateway to the information the organization maintains online.

Your default home page, the document you can automatically load every time you start NCSA Mosaic, is specified in the mosaic.ini file. As distributed by NCSA, it points to the NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows Home Page. Note that home pages are normally identified by URLs. Using a URL pointing to your own machine, you can even specify a local file as your home page.

A special request from NCSA

Due to the heavy traffic on NCSA's Web server, NCSA asks that you configure NCSA Mosaic so that you do not automatically load an NCSA Mosaic home page every time you launch NCSA Mosaic. This can be accomplished either by disabling the autoload home page feature or by changing your default home page to some document other than an NCSA home page.

To disable the autoload home page feature:

  1. Open the file mosaic.ini with an editor that will allow you to save it again as an ASCII (text only) file. mosaic.ini is normally in the directory c:\windows\.
  2. In the [Main] section, edit the Autoload Home Page line to read as follows: 
                Autoload Home Page=no
  3. Save mosaic.ini as and ASCII file.
  4. Next time you launch NCSA Mosaic, the application will load no home page and the document view display area will be blank.
  5. NCSA Mosaic news is usually posted first on the NCSA Mosaic home pages. If you have not changed the default home page, all you need to do when you want to check current NCSA Mosaic developments is click on the Home button() on the tool bar.

To change your default home page:

  1. Decide what document would be most useful as your default home page. You might want to make the decision for convenience, choosing a document that provides a good starting point for your every day work. Find the URL of this document.
  2. Open the file mosaic.ini with an editor that will allow you to save it again as an ASCII file. mosaic.ini is normally in the directory c:\windows\; if it is not in this directory, check the directory indicated by the environment variable MOSAIC.INI.
  3. In the [Main] section, edit the Home Page line to reflect the desired document: 
                http://machine_name/directory/filename
  4. Save mosaic.ini as an ASCII file.
  5. Next time you launch NCSA Mosaic, it will automatically load and display the newly defined document.
  6. You will still be able to access the NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows Home Page by selecting Starting Points ... Windows Mosaic home page.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu