September 2000 Camera Bag

Creating a Website

WHEN I FIRST GOT ONLINE about three years ago, I knew nothing about websites, but after I began to explore the Internet, one of the things that amazed me is that anyone can create a non-commercial personal website for free. The only cost involved is the price you already pay for Internet access. Since I was the full-time editor of R&R, I had no need to add a rail-oriented website to my existing workload, since anything worthy of a website would probably go first into the magazine anyhow.

My �hobby,� however, was my diving club, and a website would be a very useful and colorful alternative to the somewhat laborious photo-copied one- or two-page Nor�Easter newsletter. So I just sat down one evening, knowing absolutely nothing about websites, and within six hours I had a respectable page up and running. Being familiar with photo cropping and basic layout and having used ASCII �tags� in text writing certainly helped, but this is not rocket science, and a few simple explanations can make it all quite understandable to anyone.

The secret to website work is to learn a few basic elements and then just copy and repeat them in any order you want. You need to create a basic blank page, apply commands for text and background color, identify body text and headline styles and sizes and create a box for any photograph in JPEG or GIF format. One additional command will let your site �link� to other pages on your website or any other website on the entire Internet.

Okay, now. You�re all railfans. You can tell a Mikado from a Challenger and differentiate an SD90MAC from a Dash 9-44CW and tell the difference between the HanJin double stacker and SU-100 just by looking at the consist. Don�t be scared when I mention that terrifying term: HTML.

Websites are created using �HyperText Markup Language,� or simply �HTML.� This is a series of written English language instructions that tell the computer what to put up on the screen. Unlike a magazine page, where all the elements (photos, captions, headlines and text) are fixed in place, HTML pages may look slightly different when displayed on different screens because of screen size and the relative proportions of the viewer�s screen settings. As you get further into web publishing, there are elaborate tools like frames and tables that will force specific page layouts, but they are not necessary for beginners -- I still don�t use them.

Like any computer commands, HTML must be exact, for any typo or mistake will create a wrong result. A comma in place of a period can botch the whole works and can sometimes be maddening to detect -- but HTML will always work, and if it doesn�t, there is no such thing as a �glitch.� You simply have to find the error that you made. And I�ve made some doozies. However, you can preview your work as you go, so detecting errors is fairly easy and can actually be a lot of fun.

Before we get into the specifics of HTML commands, let�s look at a place to put up a website. In the summer of 1997 I was looking at a friend�s GeoCities website, which carried a click-on banner proclaiming, �Get Your Own FREE Webpage.� I figured, �What have I got to lose?� I clicked on and went to work. Before the week was out, I had a webpage up.

GeoCities is a huge commercial �community� of personal websites that makes its money through advertising, and its ad banners have appeared over the months with varying degrees of intrusion and irritation to the viewer. About a year ago GeoCities became part of Yahoo!, and the service noticeably improved as the advertising became more professional and less intrusive. As a beginner, I liked GeoCities because it provided everything I needed, including an upload program for images and a file manager that was easy to use. I did not need to have a webpage design program like Front Page or PageMill.

There are two basic approaches to posting a website. You can use a service like GeoCities, where the entirety of your program exists only on the GeoCities computer server (which is how mine is set up), or you can use an Internet Service Provider where you design the site on your own computer and then �publish� it by transmitting it intact to the server. In the second scenario, the website will reside on your computer, where you can modify it and then transmit it intact to the server whenever you choose to update -- this �FTP� (File Transfer Protocol) process, however, can be rather time-consuming, though many people prefer it.

The only thing that you need besides a computer and an online connection to create a website is a source of photos, if you desire to use them. Since I do book preparation work, I have both a flatbed scanner for prints and a slide scanner for transparencies, so I was all set (see the June 2000 Camera Bag for a discussion of scanners). Some photo processors will now provide image scanning service, if you don�t have a scanner.

As I said before, I went with GeoCities because it gave me everything I needed in one neat package, and I would still recommend it to a beginner. You can always change or add a new website elsewhere later as you become more familiar with the process.

The GeoCities of 1977 consisted of dozens of �neighborhoods� with four digit addresses. The neighborhoods were named and grouped to reflect the general topic and content of the websites such as sports, hobbies, computers, aliens, etc. For my dive website I went with the Yosemite/Rapids neighborhood for �Outdoor Sports� and selected the address 3435 from about 50 that were offered (it was the only easy-to remember number available). The resulting website address was www.geocities.com/yosemite/rapids/3435, which is kinda a mouthful.

When I signed up for my Camera Bag demo website in mid-June 2000, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that since GeoCities was incorporated into Yahoo!, they have changed the address protocol to a more direct and personal name. I was not aware as I was signing up that the screen name that I gave them would become my domain name, but I was lucky that the one I chose worked very nicely.

To register for a new website, I clicked on the �Get Your Own Free Website� button on my dive site, which took me to http://geocities.yahoo.com/home. On the Build Your Website page, I clicked on �I�m a new user / sign me up!� I signed up as �JBoydCBag� and created a password that I could remember -- since it was �available,� the name went right through. (On my dive website, I had to try three variations before I got one that had not already been taken.) I completed the simple info form which asked for my birth date and e-mail address and some simple password conformation information (my advice here is �keep it simple!� When asked �Where were you born?� I put down simply �Dixon� since any punctuation or abbreviation of �Illinois� could be a potential error if I remembered it wrong if I needed to reference it in the future to confirm my identity.

I was immediately confirmed and assigned the website at: http://www.geocities.com/jboydcbag. In general, the address names are not �case sensitive� to capital letters, but it�s best to keep everything in a URL in lower case letters. That website is now up and running, and I�ll have a few pages up by the time you read this. In the next column, I�ll describe the process of building each page and explain how the various HTML elements work.

Here's what the text would have looked like without the 60% table:

(TEXT CENTERED)

Here's what the same text would have looked like flush left:

Here's the entire text set up on an 80% table 2-column format:

Before we get into the specifics of HTML commands, let�s look at a place to put up a website. In the summer of 1997 I was looking at a friend�s GeoCities website, which carried a click-on banner proclaiming, �Get Your Own FREE Webpage.� I figured, �What have I got to lose?� I clicked on and went to work. Before the week was out, I had a webpage up.

GeoCities is a huge commercial �community� of personal websites that makes its money through advertising, and its ad banners have appeared over the months with varying degrees of intrusion and irritation to the viewer. About a year ago GeoCities became part of Yahoo!, and the service noticeably improved as the advertising became more professional and less intrusive. As a beginner, I liked GeoCities because it provided everything I needed, including an upload program for images and a file manager that was easy to use. I did not need to have a webpage design program like Front Page or PageMill.

There are two basic approaches to posting a website. You can use a service like GeoCities, where the entirety of your program exists only on the GeoCities computer server (which is how mine is set up), or you can use an Internet Service Provider where you design the site on your own computer and then �publish� it by transmitting it intact to the server. In the second scenario, the website will reside on your computer, where you can modify it and then transmit it intact to the server whenever you choose to update -- this �FTP� (File Transfer Protocol) process, however, can be rather time-consuming, though many people prefer it.

The only thing that you need besides a computer and an online connection to create a website is a source of photos, if you desire to use them. Since I do book preparation work, I have both a flatbed scanner for prints and a slide scanner for transparencies, so I was all set (see the June 2000 Camera Bag for a discussion of scanners). Some photo processors will now provide image scanning service, if you don�t have a scanner.

As I said before, I went with GeoCities because it gave me everything I needed in one neat package, and I would still recommend it to a beginner. You can always change or add a new website elsewhere later as you become more familiar with the process.

The GeoCities of 1977 consisted of dozens of �neighborhoods� with four digit addresses. The neighborhoods were named and grouped to reflect the general topic and content of the websites such as sports, hobbies, computers, aliens, etc. For my dive website I went with the Yosemite/Rapids neighborhood for �Outdoor Sports� and selected the address 3435 from about 50 that were offered (it was the only easy-to remember number available). The resulting website address was www.geocities.com/yosemite/rapids/3435, which is kinda a mouthful.

When I signed up for my Camera Bag demo website in mid-June 2000, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that since GeoCities was incorporated into Yahoo!, they have changed the address protocol to a more direct and personal name. I was not aware as I was signing up that the screen name that I gave them would become my domain name, but I was lucky that the one I chose worked very nicely.

To register for a new website, I clicked on the �Get Your Own Free Website� button on my dive site, which took me to http://geocities.yahoo.com/home. On the Build Your Website page, I clicked on �I�m a new user / sign me up!� I signed up as �JBoydCBag� and created a password that I could remember -- since it was �available,� the name went right through. (On my dive website, I had to try three variations before I got one that had not already been taken.) I completed the simple info form which asked for my birth date and e-mail address and some simple password conformation information (my advice here is �keep it simple!� When asked �Where were you born?� I put down simply �Dixon� since any punctuation or abbreviation of �Illinois� could be a potential error if I remembered it wrong if I needed to reference it in the future to confirm my identity.

I was immediately confirmed and assigned the website at: http://www.geocities.com/jboydcbag. In general, the address names are not �case sensitive� to capital letters, but it�s best to keep everything in a URL in lower case letters. That website is now up and running, and I�ll have a few pages up by the time you read this. In the next column, I�ll describe the process of building each page and explain how the various HTML elements work.