Freedom of Press: Web Serving

If you have something you want the world to know, you can publish it from your Unix account. All you really need is something to put there. Talk to your ISP about how to do this, but usually you get web space as part of your Internet service package. In other words, if you’re not using it, you’re wasting money!

You normally write web pages with a special web editor, such as Netscape Communicator’s Composer. You can also write them by hand, though I wouldn’t recommend it. See my own Basic HTML here on Negative Space. Your main page has to be called “index.html”, and the rest of them can have any filename ending in “.html”.

Web pages are written using something called “HTML code”. It’s called code because it was created by programmers, and they call everything that they write “code”, probably because normal people can’t read it. HTML code, however, is just normal text with HyperText Markup Language “directives” sprinkled throughout it. For example, if you want to emphasize a word, you surround it with the HTML “emphasis” directive:

<em>wow!</em>

appears as

wow!

There are also directives for headlines, citations, strong text and lots of directives no one understands, such as blinking text.

If you want to link a word to another web page, you surround it with the “link” directive, which is just a URL:

<a href="http://www.hoboes.com/html/NetLife/">Neon Alley</a>

appears as

Neon Alley

and if the reader selects those words, they are transported to the Neon Alley on Negative Space. You don’t have to worry about this if you’re using a web editor to create your web pages, however. The web editor will do the ‘code’ for you, and all you have to concentrate on is the content. If you want to pay for one, the two best web page editors are currently Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver.

If you want to see how someone else’s web page is “coded”, most web browsers allow you to “view” the “source” of any web page you’re looking at.