CAVE said:
Kelley,
I may have to take you up on your offer, but I would like to set up a simple page as you did for myself. I agree that I don't want to spend too much time at it as I have many better things to do with my time in the garage. However, I'm sure I could easily be sucked into the snowball effect if I'm not careful as I love messing around with new things. Is setting up a geocities site free or do you have to buy some software or something as was mentioned above? Thanks for all the help guys.
Cole
If you like. I'll help you where I can.
There are two books that have proven invaluable to me -
HTML 4.0 for Dummies and the smaller, comb-bound "quick reference" they put out.
Geocities offers a front-end for coding HTML, but I've not used it. HTML can be "hand-coded" (the way I did) using Notepad or a similar text editor. When you go to save the file, change <Save as type> to "All Files" and add <.html> to the filename to save it as an HTML file.
"Hypertext" simply refers to the fact that the text can be considered "active" - that's what all the tags and such are for. The tags just instruct the browser - whichever one is in use at the time - how to handle and process different things. They identify links to other items/pages, what colours to use for what, where images go, how big they are, and the like.
One of the smartest things you can do when learning it yourself is to go to some simple web pages, right-click anywhere in the field of the page, and select the "view source" option on the menu you should get. Print the page and the source, and then sit down with both printouts and your reference of choice. This will allow you to see a completed source file, a completed end product, and have a reference on how things work while you're about it. An HTML reference won't cover Java/Javascript and will give a passing nod to "Cascading Style Sheets" - but you'll get basic HTML going in your head, and I find it easier to pick something apart than to create something from whole cloth when I'm first learning.
You don't need to "upload" HTML pages to anywhere in order to test them - just check them on your local hard drive. Hell, you don't even need an Internet connection until you go to "up" the pages, or to test offsite links.
Geocities also has a fairly simple front-end for file handling (uploading, updating, and organising) that is resident on their server, although you can use a local FTP client if you want to do more than the site offers (they give the information for setting up FTP - I use CuteFTP myself, but I've been using it for years.)
Do go ahead and review some "fan sites" - since they tend to be fairly simple - and if you want to see the source for some of my pages, I'm willing to share. You can then do the same thing - compare the source file with the output file, and pick the source apart until you start to understand what's going on. It should make it easier for you to understand.
5-90
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