Getting started online.
The best way to learn to make web sites is to dive right in. We'll do that immediately, in a simple way. But
before we do, there are a few things you need to do.
- Get an account on fargo, the ITP student web server. You may already have one. If you don't contact the department's technical staff and request one as soon as possible.
- If you have a computer at home load it up with the necessary tools. These include: an HTML editor, an FTP client, a Telnet client, and at least one web browser.
Make a page.
Using a simple word processor such as Notepad or BBEdit, make a text document. If you use a fully featured program like Word or WordPerfect make sure
to save in plain text format, not in the program's native fancy format. The most important things to remember when making your first pages is to give your documents the proper
structure, and name your files properly.
- Structure of an HTML document. You'll learn how to build on this structure later, but the reasons why aren't important at this point.
It is important to get in the habit of doing it the right way now.
<![CDATA[
<html>
<head>
<title>Put the title of your page here.</title>
</head>
<body>
Put your content here.
</body>
</html>
]]>
- Name your file with ".htm" or ".html" at the end. (Don't let any other suffix get attached to the file name by the program you're using.
Check the file name after you save to make sure it came out right.
- Take the brief essay your wrote for this week's assignment and paste it in between the body tags in your document. Save it and upload it
to your account on fargo. Put the file in the public_html folder of your account.
- Your URL (Uniform Resource Locator, the address of your page) will be: http://fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~yourloginid/yourfilename.html
- Send me an email message. My address is mc39@acf2.nyu.edu. Let me know the URL of your homework assignment.
I also need your address to send you info about the class email list (so even if you are a total flake and don't write the essay, you should
still do all the things on this page so as not to fall hopelessly behind).
(Important note about HTML editors: At this point I would prefer that you use a fairly low-tech editor like HomeSite (Win) or BBEdit (Mac) because
it is essential to the purposes of this class that you become familiar with the code that makes web pages work. There are other kinds of WYSIWIG
editors such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage which will generate code for you, and as you advance in understanding I encourage you to switch to a program
like that if you want to, but for now you should not use these programs. I expect everyone to be able to explain and debug the code in their pages
on the fly in class so keep your pages simple for the first couple of weeks and use a program that helps you with simple tags only.)
Building Web Sites - ITP Fall 2000 - Mike Cosaboom, Instructor
mc39@acf2.nyu.edu