Beat the Winter Blues Workshop on Web

Exercise 1: FTP review

1. First of all, while Windows98 does not mind spaces, the operating system of the computer which runs the web-server does. This means that whenever you edit a file do not use any spaces, use the under_score instead. When you download files or images from the web, check whether they have spaces in their filename. If so, simply remove them when the computer asks you for the name under which to save the image.
2. Last time, we transferred an entire folder from your computer to AFS. From now on, you will most likely only transfer individual files. There are two file-transfer modes that are important to distinguish.
3. Please use AbsoluteFTP to transfer files. Log into your AFS account, which most likely has the same username and password as your Novell account. Once logged in, select the window entitled FTP Access to RHIT's AFS Filesystem - HTML, if it is not already selected. Click on the + symbol in front of your Public directory. This should bring up an HTML folder. Double-click on the HTML folder. You should now be in the place where the web-server will look for your files. AbsoluteFTP will transfer all files to that folder now. Move the window out of the way.
4. Now select the Local(YourUserename) - RHIT window. Select the source directory which houses the files you want to transfer. Select the file(s) you wish to transfer. If you wish to transfer more than one file, hold down the ctrl key when clicking on the filename.
5. Click on the COPY icon at the top menu bar.
6. Single click on the HTML folder in the FTP Access ... window and click on the Paste icon in the top window bar.
7. If the files to transferred are known to the FTP program it will simply transfer them. For an unknown file format, as judged by their extension, FTP will ask you whether the file should be transferred in ASCII or Binary mode. The rule of thumb is that images, i.e. any file that ends in .jpg, .gif, or .bmp is a binary file and has to be transferred as such. A binary file is made up of little pixels, such as can be found in stadium screens. Any .html document will always be transferred as an ASCII file.
8. When you are done, simply exit AbsoluteFTP.

Exercise 2: Tables

1. Click on the Table icon, which is located on the right-hand side of the editing menu bar. This will bring up a window.

2. Let's start simple. Create a table with one row and two columns. Align the entire table in the center. There are some other formatting features that you may find interesting and that I encourage you to explore at a later time. If you click on OK, you should get an empty table on your web-page.
3. If you right-click on the table you get the chance to edit a cell, row, column, or the entire table. For now, select Table Properties.
4. In the window that pops up, make sure that the Table tab is selected. Unselect the check-mark to the left of the Borderline width box. Click on Apply and OK. In your web-document, you now see an outline of the table.
5. Cut and paste some text into the left cell and cut and paste something else, may be a picture, or some more text into the right cell.
6. Select the text in one of the cells and experiment with the alignment. The alignment button can be found in the upper right corner of the formatting menu. If you right align everything in the left-hand cell and you left align everything in the right-hand cell, then the text meets in the middle. So how do we get some space in the middle?
7. We simply add a third column in the middle which we use to separate the two existing columns. New columns are added to the right of the currently active cell.
8. Click on the left-hand cell and then right-click. In the window that pops up, select Insert and then Column. Then click somewhere in the center of the newly added cell so that the cursor is noticeably in that cell. If it isn't, things are gonna be ugly.
9. Now, right-click on the cell so as to get back to the window with which to edit the table. Select the Cell tab, inside of it, place a check-mark in the box to the left of the Cell width item and experiment with the setting. Try 10% first, but also experiment with pixels. Both have their use.
10. If you like what you have feel free to FTP the edited web-page to your AFS account.

Exercise 3: Editing HTML tags

1. Feel free to look at your own home-page. It probably has a lot of HTML tags in there.
2. Go to my home-page (www.rose-hulman.edu/~wollowsk) and have a look at the HTML tags. There are probably much fewer tags. This is because I edited the page from scratch.
3. If you would like to start all over again with you main page, you can do that by simply removing your index.html file from you AFS account (or you can rename it to some other name, such as index.bac) and start anew.
4. I posted quick reference guides to some simple UNIX commands as well as to Emacs, an editor that you can use to edit your files.
5. If you would like to learn more about HTML tags, log into one of your AFS accounts and knock yourself out.
6. It is best to use a piece of software called Secure CRT to log onto your AFS account. You can find it by clicking on Start and Network Tools.
7. Once in your account, you have to change directories to Public/HTML The command to change directories is cd
8. I posted a simple beginners web-page. It does not just contain some of the most frequently used HTML tags, but also explains them. Please have a look, copy it to your machine, ftp it to your AFS account and edit it there.

If you want to get into HTML, I placed links to online HTML guides as well as a link to a rather good book on HTML. Check'em out.