Mark's how to... page

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page updated: 2005.11.20

A lot of people ask me (well, a few anyway) how to set up a web site like this. Well, I would say that it's not really all that difficult, but you do need to be reasonably computer literate. There are lots of guides, both in book form, and on the web itself (check out the freeserve instructions). This page just tells you how I did it. As Simon Quinlag would say "This is what you need for this week's hobby..." (flask of weak lemon drink optional).

Before we start. Don't read all this online - print it out. You might want to set your browser to print black text, else the white text may be invisible on white paper. Or just drag you mouse over it and cut and paste it into someting else.

ISP with some web space

You probably already have an Internet service provider if you are reading this (you may be looking at it from work). These days there seems little point in paying for an internet connection. There are plenty of free ones about, although not all come with web space. Check out how much space you will get. If you just want to put some text up, there will be no problem, but a lot of pictures will soon eat into the space provided (the larger pictures on my site take up about 170kb) . Audio files take up loads of space, even when compressed (3mins of mp3 takes about 1M). This web site is hosted by freeserve, which originally started with 5M, but now has 15M.

An HTML editor

Web pages are written in a language called hypertext markup language, which isn't as bad as it sounds. If you want to see some now, you should be able to view the html behind this page from your browser. In Netscape it's in the View/Page Source menu item. Anyway the point is it's just ordinary text with a few extra instruction tags. The files use the .html or .htm extension to tell the browser to interpret the tags. Because of this you can write html with any text editor ie. you don't need anything special. Having said that, life is a whole lot easier with a (nearly) wysiwyg editor. I use FrontPage Express which comes for free with Internet Explorer. Note: When you install IE you have several options over how much to install, and if you keep the default, it doesn't bother installing FrontPage Express ie. you need to specify the full install. A word of warning - if you reinstall over the top of an existing installation, you may lose your dial up network settings eg. the phone number, account name, stored password etc. so it's a good idea to make a note of these 1st.

Offline editing

Something that I didn't realise for a while is that a browser doesn't have to just read files on the internet eg. it can open files from your hard drive (try opening a text or picture file from the File menu). This means that you can make your whole web site on the hard drive, and blow it up to the server later - see below. You need to set up an area for it to live in eg. a directory called "my webspace". Then fire up the html editor, type some text and save it with a .html or .htm extension in your directory. You need to have at least 1 file called index.html - this is the default page that is loaded if someone goes to your site without specifying a page name ie. this is your home page.

At this point you should be able to load your page into your browser. Now you can add lots more pages called anything you like. You need to link the pages together by inserting links. The editor should help you do this eg. it will allow you specify a URL (uniform resource locator - web page address to you) or specific files such as those on you hard drive. Note: the links to files on your hard drive need to change to links to your internet web pages when they are on the server - The web publishing wizard (see below) sorts this out for you. If you put any pictures into pages remember that these need to be in the same directory (or sub directory), so that they will go up to the server too ie. they are not really embedded in the page, they are fetched when the page is loaded.

Upload to server

Assuming you have your web site all working nicely from the hard drive, now is the time to blow it up to the server. Incidentally, this is the 1st time you actually need the web space ie. you can get this far without deciding on a host. The old fashioned way to do this is FTP (file transfer protocol) which involves logging in to a dumb terminal and typing commands at a prompt - very tedious. In fact the other ways mentioned below also use FTP - they just have fancy front ends to make life easier.

If you fully installed IE. You will also now have the Web Publishing Wizard on your Start menu bar. This needs a bit of setting up the 1st time with the FTP address, your account name, password, source directory etc., but after that it's just a 4 click operation to update your web site. You get a choice whether to upload subdirectories - this helps if you have loads of big pictures which are the same as last week, and the only thing that has changed is your top level eg. home page.

This (sending everything) is OK while your site is small, but sooner or later you want to just upload the new stuff. Then you need to either learn FTP commands, or get a graphical FTP program (looks like explorer, but you can open a window that show files on the server. Then you can just drag and drop. I'm now using aceftp. Here's a screnshot of it in action...

Hit counter

Your ISP may support a hit counter directly and provide the html that you can drop into your page. Some bit of program or script on the server has to do the counting. Freeserve don't currently support this (as far as I know, nor steaming audio, which is another story). However, all is not lost. Various sites provide a service which drops a picture on your site. It does the counting for you. I got mine from www.digits.com.

Clever stuff

You can do all sorts of clever things with frames and java.I've used a java snow effect for xmas. It came from the javaboutique.

Tell me

I would be inerested to know if this has helped anyone set up a site. Send me a note.