The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Be It Ever So Humble, There’s No Place Like Your Home Page
One of the nice things about the World Wide Web is that anybody can set up a home page--even me.
To explore just how hard it is to do this, I set out to put up a Dan Akst home page. I figured I’d include some columns, some unpublished writings somebody might get a kick out of, a photo, a little background on yours truly and so forth. I started this project knowing almost nothing about how to create a Web page except that it involves something called Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML.
I’m happy to report that the whole project took me only a couple of days, including downloading and mastering the free software I used. I had a good time, didn’t tear out too much hair, and ended up with a page that looks no worse than many others I’ve seen. Take a look for yourself; it’s at https://www.caprica.com/~akst.
Creating the most rudimentary home page is easy. Prodigy users, for instance, can jump WWW to invoke the service’s Web browser, and then click the hotlink on Prodigy’s home page for creating a home page of your own. All you have to do is fill out the form, and voila. These pages really are rudimentary, though, and can’t even accommodate a photo. (America Online will soon offer users a chance to set up home pages as well.)
It’s not too difficult to create a much nicer page. A number of Internet access providers permit users to have home pages, and SLED Corp., which operates the Four11 Internet white pages service, will let anyone set up a page for a modest annual fee that varies based on how much storage you need. For information, visit https://www.Four11.com/ and choose “Web Page Services.”
The reason creating a basic page is so easy is that WWW pages are really just text files that contain some relatively simple HTML codes. These codes tell browsers such as Netscape and Mosaic to interpret the text in a certain way. The codes make it relatively easy to show boldface, different headline sizes, and hypertext links to other pages, files, etc.
HTML may sound complicated, but it really is no big deal. Mostly it consists of simple symbols at the beginning and the end of lines to indicate boldface, italics, new paragraphs and the like.
Since these are just text files, you can do the whole thing with a tool as simple as Windows Notepad.
You can get some basic instruction in using HTML from several sites on the Web, including https://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html.
There is also a good deal of software designed to make HTML page creation easy. One very simple program called Web Wizard lets you fill out a form and then generates a basic page--including, if you wish, a graphic. Web Wizard, by David Geller, is available at https://www.halcyon.com/webwizard.
Since I knew I’d want a photo on my page, the first thing I did was take a picture of myself over to the local copy shop, which scanned it into a .gif file for $10. Then I downloaded an excellent piece of freeware known as HTML Writer, created by Kris Nosack at Brigham Young University.
This program, which you can obtain at https://lal.cs.byu.edu/people/nosack/, makes HTML point-and-click easy, even when you have no real idea of what you’re doing. You write the words Welcome to the Dan Akst Home Page, for instance, select them with your mouse and then click one of the “heading” buttons, which are clearly marked to show that heading 1 is the biggest and heading 5 the smallest. I clicked heading 3 and the codes were inserted for me, right where they belonged.
The program makes it just as easy to make your e-mail address, for example, into a hypertext link that brings up a “mailto” form. And it includes a sort of sample template that contains handy HTML codes you can put at the beginning and end of your file. To preview your work, it will launch your browser. Then you toggle back and forth between HTML Writer and the browser, reloading the page off your hard drive each time you change it.
The main flaw of HTML Writer, aside from its somewhat bare-bones help, seems to be its lack of a spell-check feature. Thus, you might want to create the plain text portion of your pages in your word processor, spell-check them there, save them as pure ASCII and then work on them with HTML Writer.
This was too much trouble for me, so I did everything with the HTML software. The key thing here is getting the links right. Your home page will probably reside in a sub-directory of your home directory on your Internet provider’s computer. Links on your home page can refer to sub-pages by their file name (if the sub-pages reside in the same sub-directory) or by their full URL.
One way to get some insight into all of this is to fire up your browser and visit some personal Web pages. When you see one you like, use Netscape’s View Source command (or the equivalent on other browsers). This will show you the page as text, with all HTML codes revealed. You can even save this to a file and, replacing the creator’s information with your own, make a page that looks the same (be a sport and make some changes so that yours isn’t an exact duplicate).
When you’ve got your page ready, you’ll have to upload it to your Internet provider’s computer and set the permissions so that everyone can access it. Your provider should have information on such housekeeping matters, which can vary.
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Daniel Akst can be reached at akstd@news.latimes.com but regrets that he cannot always reply.
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Where to Look
For access to a large index of personal home pages, try pointing your Web browser at https://web.city.ac.uk/citylive/pages.html, where you’ll find “Who’s Who on the Internet.” It’s often busy, but when it works, it is a fine place to see what people are doing on their pages. You can even register your own.
