Sanjeev: Web writing tools

LINKS FOR WEB AUTHORING

A one stop shop: Alan Simpson's coolnerds

Web Promotion Virtual Promote | List of pages where you can submit URL

Frames

Windows 95 and Web pages

Windows 95 HTML Creators and Utilities

Nice things to copy

First steps

There is an excellent series of lectures arranged at Leavey Library which you might attend. This site gives the summary of the contents of these lectures and also the dates when these are going to be held
It is recommended that you might make a print-out of the information given at
http://www.usc.edu/Help/Authors/
which is a site giving "Instructions for USCweb authors."
As you will note, the first step is to run a program called
requestwww
on the unix prompt of your unix account. Merely following the instructions will suffice to establish a web page. (This command is also run to close down a particular web page).
This will automatically generate a directory called public_html in your unix account, as well as a text file called index.html in that directory.

What is visible on the web is basically the contents of the index.html file and its links. In the index.html file, links can be made to other files within your account, or to files/ locations outside your account.
Further, in order for the files to be "readable" by the web browser (such as Netscape), you will have to type:

chmod 604
each time you start a file other than index.html in your account.

[SOME MORE ON PERMISSIONS:
You might find use for the following information:
4 - read
2 - write
1 - execute

4 + 2 == read and write
4 + 1 == read and execute
e.g., chmod 644 file_name
gives read and write permission to the user,read permission to the group,and read permission to the universe.
604 is required for files in public_html
755 is required for directories in public_html ]

Thereafter comes the relatively difficult task of learning the basic HTML language and building up the page. There is no need to purchase any book on the subject. Instead, you could
(1) either download Internet Assistant for Microsoft Word from the following url:

http://www.microsoft.com/word/internet/ia/sysreq.htm,
or any other good html writer (most are available free or as shareware).
(this will automatically convert your Microsoft Word documents to html format, which can then be uploaded to your public_html directory by ftp),
(or, instead of this, you could download one of tens of html writers on the web)
or
(2) learn HTML the hard way (which is better since the web pages come out clearer, and as you "expect" them to), by printing the tons of information available on the web (e.g., you can start with the following site (by the National Center for Supercoming Applications):

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html

The learning process for html is rather time consuming. Therefore, you can expect to get stuck innumerable number of times in the process. But unfortunately, consultants at USC do not provide help on building web pages.
To begin with, you might try downloading a "ready-made" page and fill up your own information in it. This page, called "student.htm" is available at

http://www.prenhall.com/pub/be/economics.d-005/econsurfing/student.htm.
Once you download the file, and fill up your name and other details, you can upload the file to your account as and link it up to your index.html file.

The following brief collection of links might prove useful in case you are serious about developing a reasonably good web page.

General compilations

Getting your own domain name

Domain Registration Services