Technology, Literacy, and Culture Instructional Resources The Technology, Literacy, and Culture Concentration University of Texas

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HTML basics

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1. Get a Place to Publish and get it set up for web publishing

• First you need to get an "individually funded" (IF) user account. If you don't already have one you can do this by following these step by step instructions.
• When you get to the form that lets you check boxes for services, you should probably get yourself validated to use the computer called UTS unless you have a reason to use another. It is a good file server.
• Next you have to log onto you new account using the program TELNET. The name of the host is uts.cc.utexas.edu. Your username and password are the really strange ones you have for your IF account, like username: ifxx789, password: xgwwmnop. You must change your user name and password the first time you log in. After you do this it logs you off for a while while it updates its directories.
• Next you have to log on to uts.cc.utexas.edu again to go through some steps in order to set up your new account for web publishing. Look here for step by step instructions on the Personal Publishing Page. These instructions take you through the four commands you have to enter to get your new account ready for publishing:
  
  • mkdir public_html
  • chmod go+x $HOME
  • chmod go+rx $HOME/public_html
  • chmod go+r public_html/*
• You only have to do these steps one time, the first time you use the account.
• There are a lot of advantages to having your own account -- you can publish things besides what you must do for this class.

2. Get the tools to write in Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML)

• Most good software these days can write HTML files (which are just text files with some HTML codes stuck in them). If you have fairly recent software, look in the manual or on-line help for "HTML".
• Netscape Communicator has pretty good HTML authoring capabilities built into it, in the part called Composer. You can get Netscape Communicator from Netscape's Web Pages.
• Recent versions of Microsoft Word and Wordperfect have HTML support built into, and for other programs you might look on the manufacturers' web sites.
• The Campus Computer Store has Microsoft products at very low prices, so you might want to try Frontpage. Microsoft Word now has good HTML editing tools as well.
• There are also lots of good HTML editors around for both Macs and PC. I like a shareware Mac editor called Pagespinner that can be downloaded.
• Or, you can just use a simple text editor like simpletext on the Mac and wordpad on Windows. The HTML codes you need to write your class assignments are not very complex.

The main thing is this: the message is more important than the medium. Content is more important than formatting.

3. Learning HTML

There are many good primers for beginning to learn HTML. The best thing to do is just get started, using whatever editing tool or program you have. Here are some places that can give you help with specific things:
• Computer Writing and Research Lab's (CWRL) HTML Tutorial.
• UT's LEARN WEB pages provide a lot of good advice.
• Webmonkey's Teachingtool -- some call it an HTML cheat sheet
• NCSA helped make the web, and their Beginner's Guide to HTML is a good resource.
• Here's the beginning of a step-by-step approach, and a lot of in-depth information from the same source.
• some more good html information from The HTML Guru
• HTMLhelp.com another good reference
• Also, learn from what you see on the web (view document source). Keep a collection of bookmarks to pages you like.

4. Learn to move things from your local computer up to the web server

In some ways this is the most difficult part. Getting web documents written and up on the web involves 3 things:

1. writing the document (and while you are doing that checking what it looks like in a web browser);
2. moving the document from your computer to the web server;
3. and looking at it with a browser.

Many programs now do all three steps, but often it is necessary to use a program like Fetch on the Mac or WS-FTP on the PC to move files around.

Here are some instructions for getting started with Fetch

Start Fetch

in the New Connection box, for Host: put in uts.cc.utexas.edu

put in your username and password for UTS

click OK

with luck you should see the contents of directory with the same name as your username. It will include several files with names like ".cshrc" and ".login" and it should have the directory you created called public_html -- double-click on that.

public_html is your basic publishing directory. You can move files from your local mac to the web server (UTS) by using the command "Put File ..."

5. Learning some good habits from the start

• Read the Publishing Guidelines provided by TeamWeb. They're great.

6. Summary

You have done the following things:

• You got an IF account, and validated it to use the machine UTS
• You set up a publishing directory
• You got the tools to write files in HTML format
• You learned to use Fetch or WS-FTP to move things from your local machine to the server.

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SMW 12/99