Griffith Feeney
Exercise 1 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, provides a tutorial for learning basic HTML. Begin by perusing this tutorial.
Exercise 2 The idea of computer “markup” is more general than HTML and is worth being acquainted with. A very readable introduction is given in A Gentle Introduction to SGML, Chapter two of Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange (TEI P3). This is a long document, and most of your won't want to read all of it, or even most of it, but it is worth beginning to get a sense of what markup is all about.
Exercise 3 Using a text editor, create a simple HTML document of your own. The content might be the results of one of your exercises, one of the workshop presentations, or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Tips The NCSA Tutorial tells you the basics of HTML coding, but isn't helpful on the mechanics of actually producing HTML documents. For this it is suggested that you proceed as follows.
Close all applications but Netscape and TextPad (or whatever program you will use to create your HTML documents; you can use MS Word, for example, if you save the document as a text file).
Make sure both applications are open as windows, not as full screen (use the middle icon at upper right, between the "_" on the left and the "X" on the right).
Size both windows so that you can see part of each on the screen and click on either window to make it active.
Make the text editor window active and enter or make changes to your HTML code and save the file; then make the Netscape window active and reload to see the effect of your changes; note that you must save in the text editor and reload in the browser to see the result of changes.
Creating a web page is best done incrementally, beginning with a very simple HTML document and then adding to it. The process involves many repetitions of the following routine: make a change in the document, save the file, switch to the browser, reload the page, view the result, switch back to the editor in preparation for the next change. Practice this procedure until it becomes automatic. If you like keyboard shortcuts (the fastest way to go once you've memorized them), use "Cntl-F s" to save in the text editor, Alt-Tab to switch to the browser, "Alt v r" to reload, and another Alt-Tab to switch back to the text editor.
Setting Up a World Wide Web Server For those of you who want to go a step further, it is not difficult to set up, for the duration of the workshop, your own world wide web server, from which your friends and relations anywhere in the world (with internet access) can view the pages you create.
There are numerous free web servers available on the web, of which OmniHTTPd v1.01 is particularly recommended. Download it into a temporary directory from
http://www.omnicron.ab.ca/httpd/download.html.
Initiate installation by double clicking the file name (ohttpd101.exe) in Explorer. After the installation starts, Alt-Tab to Explorer and close it (best to have no programs running during an installation). Click your way through all the default choices but the last, at which you should choose not to have httpd run automatically at startup.
After installation you need to make a few simple configuration settings. First, find out the IP address of your machine by doing Start > Run > winipcfg. Write down the IP address, which will probably look something like this: 166.122.161.72.
Your IP address is dynamically assigned when you boot your computer, so if you are going to run a web server it is best to leave your computer turned on all the time. In addition to the nuisance of having to reconfigure the server with the new IP address everytime you reboot, people in other time zones won't necessarily be looking at your pages during the same hours you'll be workin. You may turn off the monitor when you're not using it, to save energy and wear and tear on the monitor.
Start the Omnicron server by doing Start > Programs > OmniHTTPd > OmniHTTPd. After it starts you will see a round blue icon in the tray at lower right on your screen, where the time shows.
To do the necessary configuration, right click this icon and then left click Properties from the menu that pops up. Then click the Server Folder and enter the IP address of your machine after "Server IP". You will also want to specify a directory in which you will put your HTML document(s) after "Server Root". Use c:\httpd\mysite as a default; you will need to create the "mysite" subdirectory of c:\httpd and then keep at least one of your HTML documents in this directory.
To use the server on a non-networked machine, enter 127.0.0.1 after "Server IP". This is useful if you are developing web pages on a stand alone computer. Though you can view your pages as local files, various things work somewhat differently.
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