Here is another way:
Put the document in your web-page directory. On Cattell, that would be the one called public_html. (If you do not have one, see the instructions in http://www.psych.upenn.edu on how to make one.) Then inform your colleagues of the document's name. If you are sharing several documents with one person or group, you may want to make a subdirectory for that group, within the public_html directory. Use mkdir to make a subdirectory.
Browsers such as Netscape then work as follows. They look for a file called index.html. If they find it, they display it. If not, they provide an index of everything in the directory. If you want to prevent people from seeing everything in your public_html directory, put a simple index file in it such as the following:
<h3>This is not Jon Baron's web page</h3>
All this does it to prevent the index from showing. You can then tell anyone you want about the files and subdirectories. You can tell them about a subdirectory, and if they enter that as the url, they will then see the full index of the subdirectory (unless, of course, you block that with yet another index.html file).
The file you make available this way does not need to be html. All browsers can display ascii files. The file can even be something like a word-processor or spreadsheet or Systat file, if you know that everyone can deal with it after downloading it. Most browsers allow downloading of any files.
Of course, these files are "public" in the sense that anyone in the world can read them, IF he or she can guess their name, and anyone on your own computer can list and read the contents of your public_html directory unless you make sure they can't. But this is a lot of trouble for someone to go to in order to read your latest incomprehensible data set or a manuscript that will in any case soon be a "working paper."