A place to put it
Where to put your pages.
(and "how much is this gonna cost me?")
If you are currently on a commercial online service, you're all set. Prodigy, America Online, and Compuserve all offer a certain amount of free web space for all members. All it will cost you is the connect time charges you spend while uploading your pages. (Which is a good prod to make sure you are offline when you are writing them.)
Otherwise you will need an Internet access provider (ISP--the "s" is for service, which can be debatable) which allows you free space for non-commercial pages included in your monthly fee. Monthly fees vary widely (some charging by the hour and some having a flat fee for unlimited hours), and not ALL offer free web sace so check THE LIST for access providers in your area.
Be sure to check whether they offer free web space.
Then--
You will need to upload your page.
On the commercial services, there is usually a place where complete uploading instructions are spelled out for you. On AOL it's keyword MY PLACE or if there is not enough info there, try keyword PERSONAL PUBLISHER.
For the rest of you, you will need an Writing
a web page
is done in a code called HTML (that's hypertext markup language for the terminally curious <g>)
If you're already saying "Oh no--programming!" don't. If it was, I wouldn't be doing it. This is not that hard, I promise.
You can do this writing, all by yourself, in your word processor or text editor, or you can use a program called an HTML editor, check here for links to downloading some of the better ones I have tried. HTML editors are handy little things to use if you don't want to manually type in all your formatting codes over and over and.... or if you want to get fancy and make all your text bright pink and your background a pretty graphic file and you don't feel like learning to write in hex.. :-P
Having an HTML editor doesn't total preclude knowing what you are doing. So here are the basics.
First of all, check your web browser's menus--if you have a View menu, click on Source (if not, try some menu that sounds like it might be similar). This is the source code (HTML) for the page you are looking at. Print it out (can't print from that window? try copying and pasting to your word processor and print from there), compare it to the actual page. You wouldn't believe how much web page writers learn from reading other people's source code. (I learned a lot that way).
Better yet, check out these samples
HTML Basics
All HTML is, is a bunch of tags. In your word processor, you hit enter to start a new paragraph, in HTML you type in a paragraph tage--<p>
Your lines of text will wrap automatically, if you want a line to break in a certain place, like here
you will have to insert a line break tag--<br>
All the rest of the tags are paired--you put an opening tag at the beginning of the text you want to format, and a closing tag at the end--<i> text to format</i>
Main Document Tags
You start with the HTML tags, to tell your browser the page is written in HTML--
<HTML> </HTML> One of these goes at the beginning of your page and one at the end--think of it this way:
they are wrapped around the thing that you want to be in HTML: in this case, the whole page. Just like your italic tags will be wrapped around the text you want to be in italics.
Next comes your Title--this will show up in the title bar of your web browser, right after the name of your browser program.
<title>Type the title of your page in here</title>
- Unnecessary peripheral knowlege--
- There are these little robots, known as spiders running, around the Web, indexing eveything they can find. So if you want your page to turn up in some index, it's a good idea to make your title indicate what the page contains. For example, one of my pages is called Scott and Dean sightings, but the TITLE is scotsite.html... not too informative. Not to mention, I really should have included Scott's LAST name in the title, cause who is going to go to a search engine and look up "Scott?"
- What's a search engine you say? Check out this page.
Next comes the BODY tag, which goes around the rest of your page,
so type in
<body>****</body> and then start typing in your page where the asterisks are.
One more thing before you can really start putting in the body of your page--a big header (what you had before was the title which goes on the title bar, this is the title that will go on your page itself--hey, I didn't make this stuff up).
It sould look like this
<head><H1>Type your big page title here</H1></head>
The <H1> tags indicate the size of the text,
The <H2> would be a smaller header
The <H3> still smaller
The<H4> is the smallest I've seen used, unless you're going for "fine print" perhaps.
The other most common formatting tags are bold <b> </b> and italic <i> </i>
On to the links....
Tags for links to other pages and to images
How do they get that underlined blue text that takes me somewhere else on the 'net? (like to a machine in France for example). That's called a link. Here's how--
I'll show you the formatting of the link in a minute but first you should know which text you want to appear in blue and underlined. Once you've figured that out, you are going to wrap your tags around that text (remember I said all tags come in pairs? well link and image tags start with the link and end with an </a> tag.)
Also you will have to know where the page (or file) is that you want to link to: name of computer in the world, directory, and filename. This page is http://www1.usa1.com/~ashworth/pages.html
That means -- it's hypertext (pages with links), it's on the machine called www1.usa1.com on my internet provider (your provider will tell you this stuff), in my directory: ~ashworth, and the page is an html file named "pages."
In the end it looks like this
<a href="http://www1.usa1.com/~ashworth/pages.html">Click here to get to my page </a>
Images and such
The last thing we'll do here (it's almost 8 a.m. now and I'm getting tired) is how to put graphics in your pages.
- (I could do "using a thumbnail image as a link to a larger image on another page" but like I said I'm tired. You may want to reconsider my suggestion to read the source code, because the little quirk of HTML is that since you use these thingies < > to code it, you can't just type them when you want them to show on a page, you have to use a code for them. This is NOT a problem, unless for example you are writing a page on how to code HTML)
All images in your pages have to be in either .JPG or .GIF format (when you get good at this you can use transparent backgrounds on your .JPG's and make them appear to float on the page, but remember, it's 8 a. m. and I've been up all night, I'm getting a bit wordy I see...)
If your image (um, graphic) is in the same directory as your page, the coding goes
like this
<img src="filenameofmypicture.gif">
That should do it.
One last note about capitalization. The tags don't care what case they are in--the page references DO.
Page references, addresses--otherwise known as URL's (Uniform Resource Locators) are case sensitive, so watch that your capitalization matches that of the link you are trying to send people to
: ) When possible, copy and paste. Say you were surfing and found a link that would go perfectly in your page: copy and paste it to somewhere so you can use it later (unless you happen to be working on your page at that exact time, then you can just paste it right in right away.)
Here is a brief sample of how your page should look when it is done:
the code and
the actual page
If you want a book on HTML that's quick and easy, I would recommend
HTML Visual Quick Reference by Scharf from QUE books.
(left-over tags to play with later on...)
<></>
</a>
> <
<>
but most of the internal links are working at this time