Building Your First Page

That's exactly what we'll do in this section. We'll cover the following areas:

• Internet access providers
• ftp software
• where to store your page
• how to enter and edit your page
• how to view you page while building it
• general suggestions of what to put

Fasten your seatbelts and let's get your butt on the Information Superhighway!

Internet Access Providers

You've probably got one by now or you wouldn't be reading this now would you. But on the outside chance you're using some magical way to access my site I'd like to spend a little time going over the basics of providers.

There's always the online services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and The Microsoft Network. They can hook you up with free software, some free connect hours and they provide a lot of neat, useful information.

If you are looking for just a connection and don't want to be bothered with all the other stuff that comes with the online services then you should investigate an Internet Service Provider (or ISP - just in case you want to throw some TLA's around - and TLA stands for Three Letter Abbreviation). There are several national providers such as PSINet and Netcom who offer connections everywhere in case you do a lot of travelling or want to be able to log on from anywhere.

Somebody else has already done the research for you on price and service comparisons for the bigtime group. Give Jay Barker's Online Connection a visit and get the lowdown.

But if you're a homebody and just want a place to tie in to the 'net and maybe store a page or two then you might want to check out regional and local providers for your area. To find the ones nearest you and get a sketch of the services they provide visit The List produced by Mecklermedia's iWORLD Productions. It's the easiest way to shop.

In fact, that's exactly how I found my current provider, RadixNet. They provide a very good service if you're located in the Washington, DC metropolitan area (that's Maryland and Virginia). We users want to keep them a secret because their service is so good we don't want a lot of other people coming on board and making it too big!

You are looking for a few key elements from a provider:

• The first is a toll-free connection like a local number or 800 number so you don't have to pay for the phone call.
• The second is a 28.8k connection so you don't go crazy waiting for stuff to download.
• The third is unlimited connect time - necessary for when you get addicted.
• The fourth is storage space for your web pages (and access to scripting if you're going to get that fancy).
• And finally, they've got to have human beings answering the phones! The first time you connect after you open your account you'll need some assistance - I promise you that. It's nice to be able to get help without undue hold time and uncaring staff.

If you're trying to figure out the pricing on how much they are going to charge you to store your pages be aware that pages don't take up much space. A megabyte of storage will hold a large number of pages. Images, on the other hand, eat up a lot of space. For example, my web site - not counting this HTML Guide, uses less than 200k images and all. I get 10 megabytes with my service so I could expand 50 times and still be within my limits. The moral is - talk is cheap, pictures are worth a thousand words but they take that much space too!

FTP Software

This is the point where a lot of folks begin to get nervous. You might be thinkin' "Oh my God, more software, more money, more techno-babble" but fear not! This is only the techie's way of saying copying a file from your computer to another computer. It's officially known as the File Transfer Protocol and is in use around the world. It's how you can move files from any kind of computer to any other kind of computer - with permission of course.

Chances are real good that you probably already have this software. Especially if you got Internet connection software from some provider or bought one of those slick packages from the store. This would be a standard piece of something like that.

However, if you find you're lacking in the FTP department (and I wouldn't go braggin' about that at some party if I were you!) you can always get some on the 'net - for free or cheap. This is not my style but I'm treadin' on thin ice when it comes to the subtleties of selecting the ftp package for the world. So I'm going to just point you to one of the fanciest software selecting sites I've ever seen. Do a search for the type of computer you're using and use the keyword ftp to get the list of all the software available. c|net provides this facility and just for grins I recommend that you subscribe to their newsletter, too (it's free).

How and where you actually create your page will determine how much you have to use ftp to move files around. If you get an account from a provider, log directly into their computer and use a local editor you can build your site on location and never need to ftp in all your life. But if you build it on your local computer and need to store it somewhere else then you're stuck. Get brave and let's move on.

Where To Store Your Page

It's not just a matter of storing your web page material. Whatever computer stores the material then has to send your pages over the 'net in response to requests to view them. Which means the computer is on all the time, hooked up to the 'net through some kind of communications link and is "known" to the internet as a host of web page material. Because all of this costs money you can expect to have to pay something for the service.

Actually, it isn't that much and the providers are getting smarter about how they charge. The first component of the charge concerns how much disk storage space you use. I talked a little bit about this earlier - text doesn't take much space but images can. As an example, my home page takes up 7,304 characters but the little bits of image that I have on it take up an additional 12,278 characters of storage. In spite of this, you can fit a very large amount of information into 1 megabyte of space (even more in 10).

The second component of the price will be some form of charge for how hard you make their computer work. I've seen it priced by how many times your pages are requested or by how much information they send across the 'net. Obviously, the first method would cause you to put all your information on one page, no matter how big it got, and avoid having people pull from your site more than one time. This method would work if you don't have much to say or don't care if anybody comes back! The volume method would cause you to design with less inline graphics to cut down on the number of characters you send across the line.

You can avoid both of these issues though - if you just want to do a personal page, need less than 1 megabyte for storage and aren't going to be displaying anything against their policy, check out GeoCities for FREE web space! That's right - FREE. It goes without saying that this is one of the best deals I've seen yet. I don't know what the catch is but for now it's a good way to build a site, get it on the Internet and have some fun. They seem to have a lot of traffic through the area which means that you will encounter "busy" signals some. But for the price who can complain.

Other places to look for bargains - associations you belong to that have web sites might also make space available for members. Some of the white pages directories are making space available for people who register. There's always a way to get your work on the web.

If you need guaranteed uptime or want to do some commercial work then stick with one of the paid services. At least the owners will be trying to keep their equipment up and operational.

How To Enter And Edit Your Page

What exactly does "enter" a web page mean? Simply that you are going to type in everything needed to make it work. If you see things like <hr> then that's exactly what you'll key. At least that's what has to be in the document for the browsers to work. Nothings hidden, there's no magic.

There are a multitude of ways to do the keying. I use a simple text editor like Notepad when I'm on my PC or vi when I'm logged into my provider's machine. I know that sounds crude and primitive but it offers two things that I really like. First, the software's free and second, it works. A side benefit - I had to learn the HTML tags.

I have tried doing this in MS-Word (both with Internet Assistant and without). The version of Internet Assistant I was using was one of the first and it didn't have a lot of the tags in it that I wanted to use. Just using the word processing stuff I found that the lines I would enter would wrap just fine on the screen, but if I ever viewed the source using Notepad or the browser I found that the lines went on forever. No big deal I guess but it bothered me. If you do use a word processing package be sure to save the files as ASCII text.

I also tried to use some of the HTML editor packages that came out about a year ago. I guess they and I were too new at the game and I stuck with my text editors. I have tried to use some of the newer ones but I end up getting impatient at trying to learn how they do what I want to accomplish. Even though they do save you some typing by inserting the tags for you, I ended up going back to the old way. Just plain stubborness.

Pick your editor and let's get your first page entered. In the following example I'm going to show the mandatory stuff in bold and the remainder of the text as normal. You will obviously substitue your own words for the normal text.

<html>
<head>
<title>Mikey's Useless Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Mikey's Useless Web Page</h1>
<hr>
Let's talk about me for a minute.
<p>
There, that's all there is now let's talk about you for a minute.  All done.
<p>
Don't you feel better?
<hr>
<address>
Contact me at mrusk@radix.net.
</address>
</body>
</html>

Simple enough right? If you wish you can check out the details of <html>, <head>, <title>, <body>, <h1>, <hr>, <p> or <address>.

How To View Your Page While Building It

I'll bet you saved your example (using the correct file extension of course), ftp'd it up to your provider's site and your on the web! No?!? You didn't think that was enough stuff to put up? Darn - I thought we were finished and I could go on to something else!

OK, so you want to be able to see your work in progress. Here's another fancy term to throw around at parties - WSYWIG (wiz - ee - wig) - that means what you see is what you get. That's a term that you should be very familiar with and apply to all your encounters not just this one. But in the meantime, save your file from the example to some directory on your disk - someplace you can find again - and start your browser.

Oops - I just made a big assumption there - you do have a browser you can start right? You don't have to have it connected to anything usually. I'm working off of my experience with Netscape and Chameleon's Mosaic (I also did some work with Internet Assistant and Navisoft's browsers). Unless you tell them to start with a blank page, they might complain a little about the network not being there. But that's OK because you don't want to get there just yet.

In Netscape, they offer an "Open File..." option on the "File" menu that will let you look around and select an ".htm" file to load. Let's talk about the extensions for a second - if you're running on a PC then you can't have very fancy file names. You've got to cram everything into 8 characters or less and limit the extension to 3 characters or less. So in this case you have to save your files using a name such as this - "sample01.htm". Netscape is smart enough that it will look for either .htm or .html when you are opening a file. Most of the servers out there do also but for safety's sake, whenever you put a reference to a file in your HTML code always show the .html extension. This means that when you ftp the file to it's final resting place you'll have to make sure to change the extension name to be .html from .htm. No big deal, just don't forget or the server might not find all your references.

Anyway, if you don't have the ability to open the file that way then you can enter the following line when it prompts for location:

file:///C|/sample01.html

Notice that there are 3 forward slashes before the drive letter; the drive letter (C in our example) is followed by a "pipe" which looks like 2 dashes on end when you hunt for it on your keyboard; then another forward slash; and the filename. This implies that I saved it at the top level of my C drive which is not a good thing to do. Rest assured I didn't, I just wanted to keep the example as simple as possible. If you're a DOS power-user and haven't had to mess with UNIX style coding - this is a sample - forward slashes instead of backward slashes in filenames.

After you press return to accept the file then your browser will load it up and let you see what it looks like. Neat huh? In a MS-Windows environment I keep Notepad up in one window and Netscape in another. I work on the page, do a save, flip over to Netscape and reload the page to see what my changes look like. This is a real nice way to build a page but it does have it's pitfalls. I'll explore some of those in the next page "Where To From Here".

General Suggestions Of What To Put

As you can imagine, there are as many views about what to put on a page as there are people. I have trouble deciding from day to day no less. But I think there are few things you can keep in mind as you build your site that will help you make these decisions.

First of all, this is your site. It's your book of what you want to show the world - and believe me - the world will come look. This is your chance to deliver a message, to give your opinions and to share some of your knowledge with others who are interested.

Think about those sites that interest you most. They probably tell some personal information about the author, then share some information about the author's main interest or hobby and finally give a set of links to friends' pages, music sites, movies or whatever. It should come natural, don't put anything up that is going to make you uncomfortable. You can be sure that everyone you know will be looking at it!

You can take a break and go visit Airyn if you promise to come back some time and finish up your lessons. She has a very extensive site that covers a lot of territory. She continually updates it and makes it quite interesting.

If you'd like to take an unusual art tour of Chicago you can visit Steve and view his gallery of watercolors. He's done a very nice job creating Big City Art, Chicago Watercolors.

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"