Uploading your site
EXPLANATION OF SOME TERMS COMMONLY USED
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
A commercial business that offers you Internet
connectivity and server hard disk space. This enables you to use the e-mail
and web browsing capacity of your home computer, and to have a place for your personal web site files so that they can be accessed by anyone in the
world.
DCN is a local Community Network; a 501(c)(3) nonprofit California Corporation.
DCN is not an ISP.
DCN contracts with a commercial ISP to provide
connectivity via dial-up or shell accounts etc. using the DCN geographical
domain name (dcn.davis.ca.us)
DCN maintains the MailingList/Listserve, Forum, and Web servers which belong to DCN not to an ISP.
Dial-up Account
This is an arrangement made with an Internet Service
Provider (ISP) that allows you to use a modem and certain software/applications on your computer to access the Internet (for email and web browsing etc.). The ISP will provide you with the telephone number that your modem must dial in order to make the Internet connection. Your computer's connecting software/application will need the ISP's Internet address with certain other information entered in the appropriate places with your log-in/username. In addition the ISP will assign a password (of your choice) to your account and may assist you in setting up your system.
Normally you pay a monthly fee to the ISP for this dial-up connection service but DCN's IPC projects are allowed to use the service without charge for a limited period.
Non Dial-up, Shell Account
This is an arrangement made with an Internet Service
Provider (ISP) for a certain amount of space on the ISP's web server to be set
aside for your use as a web site. The ISP will assign a log-in/username and a
password (of your choice) to the account. In order to use this space you do need to have a dial-up account (with that ISP or another) as described above. You also need to have software/applications such as Fetch and Telnet installed on your computer so that you can access the shell space and upload your web files.
Listserve / Mailing List
This service is provided by an ISP using special software that is resident on the ISP's servers - not on your computer. DCN maintains a server When you arrange for a Listserve the ISP's software (MajorDomo) maintains a list of email addresses that it obtains from you and/or from people 'subscribe' their names to the List. Your List has its own email address and messages sent to that address go automatically to everyone on the List. (Replies to messages also go automatically to everyone on the list.)
Your List can be set up in a variety of useful ways: a)
one person - the 'owner' can be the only person authorized to subscribe (add) or unsubscribe (delete) addresses; b) or, people can add or delete their own names (but nobody else's); c) a special, welcoming and informational message can be sent automatically to everyone who 'subscribes'; d) an automatic footer can be attached to every message; e) ... and more!
HyperNews, Discus, etc. Forums
These are discussion 'boards' that can be set up for you
by DCN to allow the discussion of issues that are important to your group. You
can check:
ALMOST ANYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW CAN BE FOUND ON THE
WWW
- The Library of Congress'Internet Resource Page at http://lcweb.loc.gov/global/internet/dev.html
- Introduction to HTML by Dianne Gorman at http://www.awpa.asn.au/html/index.html
- Getting Started with HTML at http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/html-primer.html
- Introduction to HTML at http://www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/
- NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML is available at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html
- Yahoo!'s computer area at http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/ which contains, in its World Wide Web section, a list of guides and tutorials on HTML (quality varies).
- When you have doubts about the exact form, meaning, and
limitations of an HTML tag, you should consult the most official documents on
HTML available: the World Wide Web Consortium documents at
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/Wilbur/
- NCSA's Imagemap Tutorial which will help you produce
image mapsfor use on our DCN web server. See
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/imagemapping.html
- Sun Microsystems' Guide to Web Style is an outstanding collection of advice for web authors at: http://www.sun.com/styleguide/tables/Welcome.html
- The "DO-IT" (Disabiities, Opportunities, Internetworking, Technology) web site has suggestions on how to make your pages 'accessible' at: weber.u.washington.edu/-doit/Brochures/Technology/universal.design.html
DCN WEB AUTHOR TOOLS INFORMATION
- DCN Information Providers' Resources http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/about/html/
- HTML 2.0 Code Examples at http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/go/csandvig/ip/example.html
- Find help with forms on your web page on the DCN
server with a mailform script at www.dcn.davis.ca.us/tools/mailform.html
- Try this interactive web page to generate an HTML table www.dcn.davis.ca.us/cgi-bin/table.pl
- Want to have your group subscribe to your DCN mailing
list from your web page? A script by a DCN member makes it easy for readers to
subscribe www.dcn.davis.ca.us/tools/subscribe/
- Would you like to add an interactive quiz to a web
page? QuizMaster makes it easy www.dcn.davis.ca.us/tools/quizmaster/
- Allow visitors to search your personal or organizational World Wide Web pages with the DCN personal search engine at www.dcn.davis.ca.us/tools/search/
- The DCN web team has a library of extensions for the
Perl programming language at www.dcn.davis.ca.us/tools/perl/READ_ME.html
USEFUL SOFTWARE YOU CAN FIND ON THE WEB
Note: Many sites where you can download software are
reached by using ftp:// instead of http://
- Netscape: http://home.netscape.com/download/index.html
- Internet Explorer: http://www.microsoft.com/ie/
- Adobe PageMill: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/pagemill/main.html The DCN Web Team currently recommends Adobe's PageMill as a web-page creation tool for those who wish to avoid direct HTML editing. PageMill is relatively inexpensive and available for both Macintosh and Windows environments. It's easy to use,
does not encourage bad habits and generates excellent HTML for all the major web browsers. [Warning: if you open and save in PageMill your hand generated, raw html document, PageMill will rearrange your carefully spaced lines of code making them much harder for you to follow the next time you check them - the browser will still sort it out though!]
Macintosh-specific programs:
- BBEdit HTML extensions: http://www.barebones.com/
(adds web authoring tools to the popular BBEdit programmer's text editor (free and shareware versions)
- World Wide Web Weaver Lite (shareware):
http://webster.northnet.org/
- HTML Editor (shareware): http://dragon.acadiau.ca/~giles/HTML_Editor/Documentation.html
- Graphic Converter (shareware converts between most
graphic formats): download at: ftp://mirrors.apple.com/mirrors/info-mac/_Graphic_%26_Sound_Tool/_Graphic
- Clip2Gif: converts between GIF, PICT, TIFF, and JPEG
formats - free download at: ftp://mirrors.apple.com/mirrors/info-mac/_Graphic_%26_Sound_Tool/_Graphic
- GifBuilder allows you to create animated gif images: http://iawww.epfl.ch/staff/yves.piguet/clip2gif-home/gifbuilder.html
- NCSA Telnet: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/MacTelnet/Docs/MacTelnet.Home.html
- Fetch - a Mac FTP client: http://www.dartmouth.edu/pages/softdev/fetch.html
- TextToHTML converts text to simple HTML - download at:
ftp://mirrors.apple.com/mirrors/info-mac/text/_HTML
Windows-specific programs:
- HotDog is Sausage Software's stand-alone, shareware HTML editor. It supports HTML 3 and the Netscape extensions and has many tools to simplify some of the nasty parts of HTML at: http://www.sausage.com
- WS_FTP is an excellent File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
client - (free and shareware versions) at: http://www.ipswitch.com
- NetTerm is an excellent shareware Telnet client available in both 16- and 32-bit versions at: http://starbase.neosoft.com/~zkrr01/html/netterm.html
- LView Pro is a shareware image file editor that supports all popular graphic formats and can produce transparent, interlaced GIFs at: http://world.std.com/~mmedia/lviewp.html
- Mapedit is a tool for producing image maps that supports both server-side and client-side image mapping at http://www.boutell.com/mapedit/
- Animated GIFs are all the rage. You can create them with the GIF Construction Set for Windows at: http://www.mindworkshop.com/alchemy/alchemy.html
- Brenda the Batch Renderer not only converts graphic formats, but is a great tool for palette manipulation. Download at: ftp://oak.oakland.edu/pub/simtelnet/win3/graphics/
CHECKING YOUR PAGES
When you have started creating and maintaining important HTML documents, you should learn to use a validator, i.e. a program which checks your HTML code against the HTML 3.2 (or some other) specifications. Even if you know HTML 3.2 well, you will by mistake violate the specification; for instance, just forgetting an ending quote can cause problems. Since different browsers have different error handling, you may not notice the error in your environment but your readers may get confused.
It is not sufficient to check that "it works" on your browser. Other people will use that browser in a different environment or with different settings, different versions of the browser, or even quite different browsers. Browsers very often pass invalid HTML without giving error messages, perhaps even handling in such a way that things seem to work fine. For other people, it might be a mess.
Validate your code. It is not sufficient to check that "it works" on your browser. Other people will use that browser in a different environment or with different settings, different versions of the browser, or even quite different browsers.
There are online services, i.e. Web pages containing forms which accept a URL of a document and send back the validation report. One of these is the W3C HTML Validation Service at:
http://validator.w3.org/
Test your page for accessibility at the Bobby Site:
http://www.cast.org/bobby/This site checks your pages to detemine if they are readable by those who might be using special software or hardware designed to compensate for various physical handicaps.
Check your links. One of the worst problems in Web authoring is "linkrot". Documents to which you have linked might be deleted or moved to another location. You can check both internal and external links using the NetMechanic site at
http://www.netmechanic.com/index.shtml which allows you to send a URL to be checked for technical validity of links, and receive a reply by E-mail.
PUTTING YOUR WEB PAGE ONTO THE DCN WEB
How do you put your web page onto the Web? You need to put the document and image files onto the Web server maintained by your Internet Service Provider.
(If you use a different ISP you must check with them for their instructions and suggestions.)