Getting Started

• HTML: If your pages aren't made yet, you'll need some sort of html software. If you've got no experience with HTML, you'll probably want to make a point of looking for a WYSIWYG HTML editor: with these, you work on what looks like the actual webpage, and the program writes the HTML code. WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get.
  
  If you're having trouble with writing your first HTML, you may want to subscribe to RootsWeb's HTML help list. To subscribe, click either List mode or Digest mode and put the word subscribe in the body of the message.
  
  
• FTP: You can't upload your webpages with your net browser. You need to get some ftp software to upload with. WS-FTP and CuteFTP are considered very good for PCs.
  
  If you're having trouble ftp'ing into the site, you may want to subscribe to RootsWeb's FTP help list. To subscribe, click either List mode or Digest mode and just put the word subscribe in the body of the message.
  
  
• PROBLEMS: As always, feel free to take any questions you may have to freepages-help-L@rootsweb.com or the HelpDesk. Do try to give as much information as you can about the problem; "I uploaded a file called fred.htm to my pets_html folder and can't see it; my account is ~fredsmom" will get help much faster than "I uploaded. Where is it?" You will lose much time with the latter request, as the first thing anyone will have to ask you is for the sort of information in the first example.
  
  
• SOFTWARE: A good source for downloadable html and/or ftp software is http://download.com/, which is a site owned by the TV show C|Net Central.
  
  

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Naming Pages
by Allen

Your first page, that "index" file that everyone seems to be fretting about, can have any of three designations:
index.html
index.htm
index.shtml


Most web page servers aren't so generous, but Leigh assures us that the RW server is configured to handle this. These are the file names which allow you to shorten your URL from:

http://freepages.silliness.rootsweb.com/~johndoe/index.html
to simply
http://freepages.silliness.rootsweb.com/~johndoe/


(By the way, that .shtml suffix means "secure html". If you're going to be selling pot holders or Cadillacs from your page you'll want to know about that in some detail, otherwise it may not be something you want to mess with.)

Other pages on your site can be named almost anything you want. From a web page you can call image files (JPG, GIF, etc) or text file (TXT) or, as I discovered through trial and error, even Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Non-HTML text files show up as unadorned text.

You can call all the rest of your web pages either .htm or .html as you wish. My own convention (which works well with my editor) is to only use the 4-letter suffix on index.html and everything else has the 3-letter one.

CALLING PAGES

When you list a site in places such as email you can *usually* skip at least part of the beginning of the URL. By this I mean that http://www.gnt.net/~allenr is equivalent to www.gnt.net/~allenr . Don't do this in links! The result can be, at best, unpredictable. This is only in correspondence and similar textual incidences.

For most sites when you're typing the address into your browser's location window you can skip the www part. If the site doesn't have the www as part of its address (like the Internet Movie Database - us.imbd.com) you're saved the trouble. This isn't something you can get away with anywhere except in that one box. This is because of the way the net works. Mysterious names are passed higher and higher up the chain until at some level a bot knows what it might be. To see this at work open your browser and type simply "cnn" or "ford" into the location box.

There is a fairly new wrinkle to this for Netscape users that's called "keyword browsing." You can get a (very) quick peek at this working if you enter something like "mango" in the location box.

(If you've accessed cnn.com, Ford Motor Co., or Mango Software previously your browser may have the name in it's "type ahead" cache in which case it'll finish the address before you're done typing. That's not the same thing.)