ANON | DOSSIERS | MEDIATOR

wegregor.

As every practitioner of the majikal arts and citizen of the Information Age knows, self-expression is key to self-knowledge. That expression can take innumerable shapes; a journal, doodlings, paintings, music (not the consuming kind, but the making of your own - yes, you can be a dj, too), clothes, etc.

This paper focuses on the very basics of web publishing. The operation's name, WEGREGOR, is a gloss of www & egregore; your very own thought-form entity on the world wide web.

What's required:

Web Access

Space on an Internet Service Provider to store your page(s)

Software

A text editor, like Apple's SimpleText or Microsoft's Notepad, or one of many inexpensive HTML editors out there

A browser, like Netscape or MSIE

An FTP utility like Fetch or CuteFTP

A graphic/image utility to create, resize and edit GIF & JPeG images that appear on your page

Here's the steps:

Look at some existing sites out on the web
Familiarize yourself with the various styles out there. Save some of the pages you particularly like to your desktop. It's an excellent way to learn how to build them. Try not to copy & paste outright; not only is it illegal, it's shows a meager creative intellect.

Learn some basic HTML (HyperText Markup Language).
When you view a page on the web, you're seeing the formatted display of a text file. The file contains embedded tags, enclosed in < tag > brackets, which your browser uses to make things look the way they do, like bolding & italicizing text elements and the placement of images. Tags usually have a start <tag> and an end </tag>.

For example bold text is made like this: <b>bold</b> in your text file. Italic text by <i>italic</i>.

All HTML documents begin like this:
<HTML>
and end with </HTML>

Inside, or between, these <HTML> tags is your web page.

The <HEAD> tag contains your page's title, what utility made the file (if you're using an HTML editor), and any other infomation you'ld like to add to your page that you don't want displayed in the page itself.
ie. <TITLE>MEDIATOR | Wegregor</TITLE>

The <BODY> tag contains the rest. . .

Write some text.
This is the information that will be presented to the web, and this first page should have the file name "index.htm" so that it is the first page displayed in the directory that stores the rest of your pages. Be creative!

Scan some photos or create some images.
GIF files are appropriate for line drawings or images that have large areas of solid color, whereas JPG images are best for photos. The web's resolution, since it's viewed on monitors, is 72ppi (or dpi), and your images will display at this size, so make sure what you're intending to put on your page is saved at this resolution. Also, when saving files, it's a good idea to limit the file names to the old 8.3 convention. In other words, your file name should be no longer than eight characters in length, followed by a three character description (like .gif or .jpg).

Put everything in HTML.

Now it's time to put them together. If you're using a word processing program like MSWord, be sure you save it as text (or ACSII), otherwise you'll be fine if you use any of the programs listed above.

Type these base tags in:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Homepage!</TITLE>
Replace My Homepage! with whatever you like; it's the title that appears at the top of the browser window when the page is displayed.
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Insert the text you wrote in Step 3 here. This will be displyed in the browser window.

Now, to put those tasty pics in . . . To do this you'll use the <IMG SRC> tag. To add a picture to your text elements, type
<IMG SRC="mypic.jpg">
substituting the file name of the image you want displayed between the quotation marks. Yes, you'll need to keep quotations on either side. IMG of course is the code for IMaGe, while SRC tells the browser the location or SouRCe of the file. It's important to remember to upload your image and your index.htm file to the same directory, or the tag won't work properly as written above.

To add links to your page, another set of tags is used. For example, to enable the people who are browsing your page to send email to you with a click of their mouse, like eMail Me!, you'll insert
<A HREF="mailto:myemail@myisp.com">eMail Me!</A>
into your text file. For outside links, or links to other pages in your web site, the tag is similar:
<A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com">Yahoo!</A> for an innocuous example.

Now that that's done, finish the document with the end tags:
</BODY>
</HTML>

Voila! A text file with the name index.htm, ready for uploading. You can double-click the file to view in your browser to make sure it's all as you want it to be before you do.

Put your page on the Web.
Now that you've checked you file(s) you're ready to upload them to your service provider's webspace. Note that there are a number of free sites out there, if the one that provides you with internet access & email charges for it. Try www.tripod.com, or www.geocities.com for example. You'll want to make sure you upload everything; your .htm file(s) and all the .gif's and .jpg's you've referenced in your pages, in the same directory that you have access to. Use whatever FTP utility you have, and follow the directions that are given on the server exactly.

Congratulations - you're part of the web publishing community.