You Too Can Have A Web Page

You Too^TM Can Have A Web Page
Posted to %afda by Caleb on 30 August and 8 September 2000

Sarah Lucas wrote:
>> Hey, at least you can say you have [a web page].

and Laura Shadbolt wrote:
> Ditto.

Hey, You Too^TM Can Have A Web Page! (Or is that "you two"?) All anyone has to do to get a website nearly just like mine is to call up Iowa State University, get an enrollment form, fill it out, send it back in (with money, of course), and get accepted to join teh university as a student. Then, you sign up for a free (not counting teh fact that you pay tuition, of course) e-mail ID, which includes some 50MB space on teh university's network system. Then, you follow some steps on some web page somewhere to prepare it for being a web site (which basically consists of making a directory called 'www' and telling teh university's computer that you will put a web page or more in it). Finally, you learn HTML - from scratch now, no cheating with these fancy programs that can do it for you - and make yourself a web page.

See, isn't that simple? And cost effective, too!

Oh, and then you must go months without making any changes to it.

Then Laura Shadbolt wrote:
> Ahhh - I can't be bohered to learn HTML, and I'm already working on a site
> using one of those fancy programs. But I've run out (rather quickly) of
> things to say on it. I'm just not an interesting enough person :-(

Not only can You Too^TM Have a Web Page!, but... You Too^TM Can Learn HTML!

It's really simple. Let's take it in steps. Assuming you have a) a text editor b) a computer to run the editor on, complete with monitor and keyboard (and mouse, if you insist) and c) something to write.

Now, start your text editor. No, wait, belay that, seaman! Start your computer, then start your text editor. Any editor will do, as long as you can save teh files as good old text files (thats .txt for those of you hung up on extensions to file names). Write something. Preferably what you want to show on a web page. This is for text only, currently If you want to put pictures or other media on your web page, we'll wait just a bit for that.

Done writing yet? Not as easy as it seems to write something, is it? Now, for teh easy part.

At the top of your text file, put teh following: <HTML><HEAD><TITLE>

Immediately after these, put teh words you want to appear in the title bar of whatever browser you use to look at web pages. Immediately after that, type </TITLE></HEAD><BODY>. Then, go to teh bottom of teh file, and type </BODY></HTML>. Good - we're about 1/3 of teh way done now.

Next, if you had a heading for your text file, put this in front of it: <CENTER><H1>, and behind it put this: </H1></CENTER> If you have a subtitle, repeat teh process, using a 3 instead of a 1.

Got that done? Good. Now, go through teh meat of your file, changing and adding a few things. Whereever you have a new paragraph, put a <P> where the break occurs. Where you have a quotation mark, replace it with ", and likewise replace ampersands with &. Now, also keep an eye out for greater than and less than signs, replacing them with > and <, respectively.

Now, for a bit more elegance in formatting. Anywhere you want to underline something, put a <U> at the beginning of teh section to be underlined, and a </U> at teh end. (Starting to see how these things work, yet?) The same thing for italicized sections, using <I> and </I>. Bold is, surprisingly enough, <B> and </B>.

Now, we are about 2/3 of teh way done. The fun stuff comes next. Decide where you want to put images, and be sure you have teh images in teh same directory as your file. Now, wherever you want an image, type <IMG SRC=", followed immediately by the image name, and immediately follow that up with ">. So, it should look something like <IMG SRC="coolimage.jpg">. Now you have images, and are only missing the funnest thing on the net, links!

For your links, first decide what pages you are going to link to, and go to them. At each page, write down teh URL for teh page - that is teh thing that usually starts with "http://www." near teh top of your browser. Once you have these, go back to your text file. Wherever you want to link to a page, at teh beginning of teh text to be teh link, type <A HREF=", followed immediately by teh URL of teh page you are linking to. Right after teh URL, type ">, and then go to teh end of teh text that will be your link, and type </A>.

Alternatively, if you want to link to a page that you will be making, be sure to save it in teh same directory as teh file you are currently working on, and for teh URL only use teh file name of teh new file.

And that is how You Too^TM Can Learn HTML!

Don't forget to check out the sequel, You Too^TM Can Maintain A Web Page!