Transcript Practical 1

3011: Geographies of Cyberspace
Making Your Own Piece of
Cyberspace: Web Page 101
Martin Dodge
([email protected])
Practical 1, Friday 8th October 2004
http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace
Today’s practical
• some background on the Web
• what is a web page like
• making a web page of your CV
• getting your web page on the Internet
Where did the Web come from?
• the Web started life in 1989, but really took off in the
mid 1990s with the release of free graphical browser
software (Mosaic, then Netscape)
• Invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist working
at CERN lab in Switzerland. idea of easy sharing of
documents for scientists
• based on ideas of hypertext, distributed set of
documents that are linked by hyperlinks. hypertext
originated by Ted Nelson
Web and the Internet
• Web is most common interface to the Internet, but
they are not one and the same
• the Internet existed long before the Web
• the Web can not exist without the foundation of the
Internet
• the Internet supports many other information
sharing and communication services in addition to
the Web, e.g. IRC, email, telnet, p2p
• the key Web standards (protocols to exchange data)
are open and anyone can use them
What do we know about the Web?
• no one really knows anything for sure!
• the Web is completely decentralised and freely
growing and evolving.
• no one is in charge, you don’t need permission to
put a page up or create a link
• anything can be added or deleted at any time.
deleting web pages, leaves no trace. lots of broken
links!
• the Web is growing quickly, new services and
technologies are being deployed all the time
• you don’t need permission to put stuff on the Web
How big is the Web?
• minimum of 4,285,199,774 pages (size of Google)
• maximum of 100 billion ‘pages’ (database driven
sites that generate dynamic pages on request)
• various ways to measure its characteristics
– number of web pages, sites, servers,users
– age of the web pages
– user behaviour (how long online, how many sites visited,
how many clicks etc)
– most popular sites (audience ratings)
– search engines - coverage, currency, search terms
– number of registered domains (dot com’s)
Number of Web sites
• A web site is hard concept to define
• Netcraft’s survey <http://www.netcraft.com/>
• 54,407,216 web servers estimated Sept. 2004 survey
Size of some ‘local’ sites?
• www.casa.ucl.ac.uk - 2,720 odd pages
• www.geog.ucl.ac.uk - 5,510 odd pages
• www.ucl.ca.uk - 310,000 odd pages
• www.ic.ac.uk - 127,000 odd pages
(source: estimates from Google)
Most popular Web sites?
Nielsen//NetRatings, <http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/>
What is a web page?
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it is just a single file
the file is text
written in html (‘hypertext markup language’)
the file has the extension of .html / htm
it is on a web server (usually a dedicated PC)
the file contains ‘content’ and ‘markup code’. You see
the content on screen in the browser and the markup
code tells the browser how to display the content
(e.g. bold, italics, centred text etc etc)
• the html code can also link into other multimedia files
such as pictures, animations, movies and sounds
• you also define hyperlinks to link to other web pages
• lets look at the html code of a typical page,
such as the homepage for the 3011 website
Now work through the rest of
the slides by yourself
Ask for help if you get stuck!
• have a go at viewing the source yourself
• open Netscape and load the cyberspace course
page - www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/cyberspace
• on the Netscape menu bar, go to
• View -> Page Source
• a new window will pop up with the html code
for this page
html code
• at first glance it looks complicated but it can
be easily deciphered
• <title> Geographies of Cyberspace </title>
• <b> text </b>
• <I> text </I>
• <a href=“page2.html”>Go To Page 2 </a>
• generally you won’t have to worry about the
technicalities of the markup codes as
applications like Dreamweaver handle this
for you
• close the source window and Netscape
Making a web page of your cv
• open your cv in Word
• start program called Dreamweaver
Start -> Internet Applications -> Dreamweaver
• this is a powerful web authoring package
Watch out for the
pop-up tool windows
• you now want to copy and paste the text of your cv
from Word into Dreamweaver
• In Word select all the text, Edit -> Select All
• then Edit -> Copy
• now switch to Dreamweaver and go Edit -> Paste
• the result in Dreamweaver should look something
like this (but with your cv obviously!)
Getting started in Dreamweaver
• Dreamweaver is pretty powerful. It uses
several pop-up menus with different
functions
Objects
Properties
• we’ll go through some of the common things
you can do
• lets start with a bit of formatting of the text
Centre text and make it bold
Select some text and then use the Align Center and Bold
buttons on the Properties pop-up. (you get the idea I’m sure)
Align center
BOLD
• try some different property options
• for example text colour, font type, font size
• work through your whole cv, quickly setting
the formatting you want
• now try some of the Objects functions
• embed different things into your web page
• some of the most useful ones are
– images
– tables
– rules
Put in a
horizontal bar
[Properties of rules]
Make a quick table
• the second menu bar (Launcher) is not much
use to you at this stage
• although you can use the first set of buttons
to see the underlying html code of your page
• remember to switch back to ‘Design View’
Page properties
• Modify -> Page Properties
• set the page title and try experimenting with some
different background and text colours if you want
Getting your web page online
• once you are happy with the formatting of
your cv it is time to get it live on the Web,
so other Internet users can see it
• don’t worry too much about final formatting,
it is only really a test. also, you can change
it all later
• you need to save your web page with a
specific name and in a specific place on your
r:\ drive on WTS
• web pages must be saved in a html.pub
directory on your WTS account
• you need to make a html.pub directory now, at the
top of the r:\ drive, you can use Window Explorer
directory you need is
R:\html.pub
now in Dreamweaver save
(File -> Save) the cv web page
into the html.pub directory.
Name the file you save
as ‘index.htm’
Previewing your web page
• before putting your page on the Internet you
can preview it in a web browser. This will
give you a good idea how it will look to
others
• In Dreamweaver go to
File -> Preview in Browser
• the last stage is to run a small program that changes
the file permissions of the index.htm file in your
html.pub directory
• this means the UCL web server will ‘see’ your files
and then they are online, on the Web for all to see
• don’t worry this is all handled automatically
• go to Start button -> Programs -> Internet Software ->
Publish Web Pages
When you run the Publish Web Pages
program a login screen will pop up.
type in your username & password
Your cv is now one of the billions of pages on the
World Wide Web!
Now see if you can open the new web page, start
Netscape and the web address of you cv will be
http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~xxxxxxx/
(where xxxxxxx is your username)
(The squiggle
~ is a tilde symbol)
You should see something like this.
WELL DONE.
(If not, please ask for help now!)
Going a bit further - adding
hyperlinks
• the next step is to add a hyperlink to create
a virtual link between your page and other
pages on the web
• hyperlinks are what gives the web its power
and usefulness as you can weave information
together
• lets try linking the postcode on your address
to a map. so the reader of your cv web page
can see where you live
In Netscape, go to www.streetmap.co.uk
and enter your postcode
You need to copy the web address of this page
so you can use it in your hyperlink. Right click
on the Use link and then Copy Link Location
Now in Dreamweaver, highlight the postcode
text and right-click in the Link box, on the
properties pop-pop menu, and then Paste
• the postcode text will now be coloured blue
and underlined to show it is a hyperlink
• save the cv page again as index.htm in the
html.pub directory. (say ‘yes’ if you are asked
to overwrite the existing file)
• run the ‘Publish Web Pages’ program again
• (note, you need to run the Publish Web
Pages program every time you save
something new into the html.pub directory)
• now reload the cv web page again in
Netscape and see if the hyperlink is working.
Click on refresh to be sure you’ve loaded the
latest. clicking on your postcode should open
the Streetmap page showing the map
Some design issues
• remember to spell check and proof read
anything you put on the web
• just like the design of any document,
remember to KISS
• not too much text as people don’t like to read
a lot on the web
• avoid annoying things like frames, flashing text
and pop-up windows
• remember people like to print off web pages
to read, so check your page prints well
• avoid horizontal scrolling
Next steps
• email me the address of your web page so I
can check it - [email protected]
• spend a bit of time exploring Dreamweaver
functions and make some other test web
pages to put online
• try adding hyperlinks between them
• Dreamweaver has various tutorials
• the next step will be putting images in your
webpage. we cover this in the next practical
More help - try netskills
www.ucl.ac.uk/is/training/netskills.htm
(when you register, enter ‘University College London’
as your organisation)