IT and the Historian: Week 11: How to write your own web page!

Today's exercise is twofold. The FIRST thing you should ALL do is to catch up on all assignments not yet completed. In particular you should go back to the last lesson, and complete it. The last lesson involved another literature search, for the books and articles written by your favourite Professor. Part of the assignment was to insert a picture of your chosen Prof. in Microsoft Word 6.0. All history department staff now have their pictures on the departmental web page.

When you have finished all your assignments, you can go onto the last topic this IT course will deal with. And what is that, I hear you cry with bated breath. Well, I thought, given your growing confidence and IT ability, that everyone on this course ought to know how to write a modest World Wide Web page. It is not difficult. That is why so many people write web pages. Many of them are not that bright, too, so you lot should have no trouble at all. The best thing you could NOW is to read the excellent beginner's guide to writing web pages produced by the University Computing Service.

SOME BASIC POINTS ABOUT WRITING WEB PAGES
A web page is basically just plain text, with added tags which browsers like Netscape recognise and convert into the web page you see here. If you want to see what this page looks like, pull down View Source from the menu bar in Netscape. The following points need to be remembered:

You should write web pages using the text editor Notepad.
You must give your web page the .htm file extension. So in Notepad, you should save it as filename.htm. Otherwise Netscape will not see it!
You can open your .htm file with Netscape using the menu command, File Open File from the menu bar in Netscape.
You can only (usually) insert graphic files with the extension .gif or .jpg
Once you have written a web page you need to publish it, which is a separate process. To be read by the whole world, rather than only you, your Web pages need to be placed on the campus UNIX system. For publishing your pages see the UCS guide.
Lastly, if you type EXACTLY what follows in Notepad, with your own variations, and save it to an .htm file you should have your very own web page (or copy the whole lot and paste it into Notepad, and edit it). After you have finished it, open it with File Open File in Netscape.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>
My first web page 
</TITLE>

</HEAD>

<BODY>
<H1>My first web page</H1>
My memories of the best lecture I have heard in this University so far. End every paragraph with a <p> tag
</BODY> 
  
</HTML>

Good luck! Next week's lesson is really a bit of a joke.

Some very useful UCS documents on-line.