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Computerphobia

The good news about computers is:
No one ever got rabies from one,
and
Building a website is less painful
than getting a root canal.

It's easy to build a gorgeous webpage!



Background: Joan of Arc

Since I've built this site, I've recieved lots of interest on my ideas of how to use the internet in education of the social social sciences and the environment.

The bad news is that many of the professors that are willing to help:

think they can't find the time
or
are computerphobic.

To those who think they can't find the time:

Yes, it will take several hours to learn HTML, but how many years has it taken for you to get your degrees so you could teach? A few hours is nothing compared to the improvement that the net can make in your ability to teach. In addition, my system costs nothing, so you don't have to worry about gettting approval for a budget allocation.

For those who are computerphobic



Over the 51 years since UNIVAC, there has been great progress in making computers more user friendly. This was nessarsary for programmers to do their work, as well as the non-technical people who operate computers now.. UNIVAC required rewiring every time it was reprogrammed. Then programmers typed in 0's and 1's (machine language). Eventually came regular programming languages. For 40 years programming languages and tools have evolved to become easier to use. A major advance came when IBM (which people called "Incredibly Bad Machines" had it's operating system replaced by Windows). When people used IBM's old operating systems, they had to worry, I used one, TSO, in the late 80's and it looked like it had been written before the standards of usablity were developed in the 60's, even though we had a recent version. It had error messages even the senior programmers couldn't understand. Computers could be a real pain to non-technical people then. In addition, to IBM's fall as THE builder of operating systems, computer memories have become larger, so they can now use it to make computers more user friendly.

Easy Editors


If you aren't willing to invest a few hours in learning HTML, most website providers have an "Easy Editor". Easy Editors aren't as flexible as HTML text so you won't have full control over how your page looks, and since the basics of HTML are easy to master, you're probably better off learning HTML.

HTML


HTML stands for "hypertext markup language". Hypertext just means that internet text can be used to jump from one document to another, just as hyperspace, as used in science fiction is, used to jump from one space to another. If you're confused don't worry, this is trivial, I just put it in here to satisfy any curiosity you might have. "Markup language" just means it's a word processing language, as easy to learn as the languages many secrataries learned in the 80's.

Basic HTML


The first thing to do is divide your document into
the head (which gives the search engine [search engines helps others find your webpage]) information about your document,
and
the body, which contains the document. Your webpage then looks like this:

<head>
</head>
<body>
</body>

the / means the end of so </head> means the end of the head.

One thing you need to know about is: COMPUTERS DEMAND PRECISION, if you miss any character the computer usually malfunctions. As a beginner, at least 95% of all your errors will be caused by mistyping or carelessness. IT'S NOT HARD TO LEARN HOW TO BE THIS PRECISE, and virtually everyone who has used a computer has had to learn this so you can too! Since there is one major cause of computer problems, there's not much to learn. The other sources of problems are:

1) a traffic jam on the internet,
2) a glitch in a program (an unusual chain of events causes your computer to malfunction).

In designing web pages, the software is reliable enough so that often reoccuring bugs are non-existant.

Traffic jams and glitches just need to be endured. The only skill you might need is patience.

Getting a Beautiful Body



is as easy as adding text, graphics, and links.
Let's add a few things

<head>
</head>
<body background="gates.jpg" text="purple" bgcolor="pink">
Bill Gates is a very greedy man, and <font size=4 color="white">he'll pay for his greed. </font>
<img src="godzilla.gif" width=50 height=90><img src="godzilla.gif" width=50 height=90>
<a href="greed.html"<More on Greed</a> </body>


This is what your page looks like [with the exception of the background, because it's not the real background of the whole page, so it can't be shown in Netscape 3.]

Bill Gates is a very greedy man, and he'll pay for his greed.

More on Greed

An explaination of these body labels



Any file name ending in .gif or .jpg are graphics
Any file name ending in .htm or .html are text files

background is the background picture for your page

text is the color of the text

bgcolor is the background color if
You have no background
OR
If the computer doesn't load your background
(It often doesn't so also use bgcolor)

font size is the size of your text
1=smallest; 3=normal 7=largest
color is the color of the text both these end when you see&llt;font>

<img src="filename"> puts a picture in that spot height=90 width=50 are technically optional, but leaving them out often causes problems.

<a href="filename"> Page name
underlines Page name and links to filename when you click on Page name.

How to get images:
For the net:

Find the image,move the cursor (the cursor is what moves when you move the mouse) over the image, right click, a menu will appear, press Save as to save to your floppy.
Or buy CD sets (10 CDs cost about $50) and cheaper packages appear too, and follow their instructions. To put images on your site: Upload will be one of the choices your company gives you (along with rename, edit etc.

Now, I very strongly recommend that you start on your first page, whether it's a serious page or a practice page.


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