WEB SITE PUBLISHING ON ICE.CREAM.ORG
A basic understanding of where to start and how it works.
Right, you're set up, you have an ice account and you want to
make your mark and produce a web site for all the world to see.
No problem your account includes a "virtual web server",
an extremely powerful and flexible web solution with no space
limits and lots of features.
Almost anything you've ever seen on the web can be done from an
ice account, whether it's java, perl CGI programming for form
processing, database integration, shockwave, real audio etc. The
limit is your knowledge and your time.
Please make sure you've read and understood our Commercial Ban before putting any web content on the ice server.
OK so lets get started...
First you'll need to know how to create web pages. You'll really
need to learn some HTML. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup
Language. The important parts of that are the Text and the Markup.
HTML is simple to learn it's not a programming language, and it's
designed to be logical and easy to learn.
The basic concept is that HTML is written in plain text using any
text editor, and contains the web page text content and some
special formatting tags. The formatting tags tell a users web
browser how you wnat the text formatted when viewed (ie bold,
undlerlined, centred etc). The tags can also point to other files
and images and the browser fit sit all together into a web page
and a web site.
A simple example. If you want to make a word on a text page bold
you markup the word with the HTML tag <B> before the start
of the word (meaning "start bold here") and </B>
(meaning "end bold here") at the end of the word.
Tags nearly all start with < and end with > and often have
a closing tag which is the same but starts with </ and ends
with >
So you might have this:
Hello <b>This is bold</b> and this is not.<p>
Notice the <p> at the end. Some tags do not have or need a
closing tag. In this case the <p> means, start a new
paragraph at this point. Web browsers ignore extra whitespace and
new lines, they rely on the HTML formatting tags to tell them
where to put line breaks, paragraphs and so on.
Although a basic (if not complete) understanding of HTML is
necessary, you can use web page publishing software which
attempts to put the tags in that you want for you. This software
improves all the time, and can help publish something quickly.
Try Frontpage Express for windows95 user which comes with
Internet Explorer 4 or look at a software site such as tucows for
other alternatives.
HTML is complicated somewhat by the fact that there are standards
stating which HTML tags any given browser should be able to
interpret, but most browsers from different companies support
additional non standard tags, and what will work for one browser
may not work for another. As new versions of browsers come out,
more tags are added, but users of older browsers may get left
behind and not be able to see pages as you intend if you rely on
newer tags.
Another point to remember is that you have no absolute control
over how a particular browser may choose to interpret your
formatting tags. As a silly example, I could produce a browser
which interprets the bold tag <b> as an underline word tag.
Another browser may decide to colour bold words red.
Images within web pages are actually seperate image files usually
stored in the same directory or a subdirectory on the server and
simply refered to within the HTML. The browser reads the HTML
tags refering to the image location and embeds the file within
the page. (The image could actually be stored on another machine
on the internet, and refered to that way also)
Images should be as small as possible to reduce download size.
There are many image file formats that computers use to store
image data. These often use compression algorhytms to make the
file sizes small. The standard formats which most browsers can
use are jpegs or gifs and these should be used for web page
graphics. Your graphics software should be able to save images
which you have drawn or scanned in these formats. Try to use the
least amount of colours as possible and to crop the images to be
as small as possible in order to reduce download times for your
site visitors.
HTML can be designed off-line on your local PC using your web
software or text editor and can then be viewed offline using your
web browser pointed to the local files. This is a good way to
develop a site before you publish it onto your server (your ice
virtual server)
HTML files have a file extension of .html so a page about books
would probably be called books.html
This exension tells the browser what kind of imformation to
expect. Some older operating systems such as windows 3.11 can
only produce file names with 3 letter extensions, in this case .htm
will work without a problem.
As an experiment, create a text file called test.html and put the
following HTML tags and text into it:-
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>My Test Web Page</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<CENTER>
<H1>This is a heading format</H1>
Hello world!<P>
</CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
any extra spacing or tabs are ignored by browsers, the same file
could be written like this and produce the same result but it
would be horrible to understand:-
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>My Test Web Page
</TITLE></HEAD><BODY><CENTER>
<H1>This is a heading format
</H1>
Hello
world!<P>
</CENTER>
</BODY></HTML>
Save this file as test.html and put it in a folder/directory on
your computer where you'll remember it's location. On most
systems once you've created the file you can double click on it
to launch it, and your browser should start up and you should see
your web page!
Notice where the title "My Test Web Page" has appeared
on your browser, usually as the window caption, and if the page
is bookmarked by someone this is what will appear in their
bookmarks.
There are some basic rules in HTML such as a <TITLE> tag
should appear within a <HEAD> tag, but it's all pretty
straight forward and understandable. You can look at the "source"
HTML of any web site using your browsers "view source"
option.
This is not intended to be a full HTML tutorial, there are many
books and many online tutorials freely available on the Internet
to learn more about HTML. These links should help:
NCSA
(at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML
The
WWW Help Page
Once you have created your HTML what you want to know is how to
get it published on your virtual server and make your website
available to the world.
This is where you'll first need to know about using FTP software.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the system you can
use via the Internet to transfer files from one machine to
another. This is exactly what we want to do, transfer files you've
created on your local machine to the remote server. FTP software,
establishes a connection between the two machines and then allows
you to see your local directories and files and your remote
directories and files at the same time and transfer files back
and forth.
There are many different FTP programs available freely on the
Internet which you can install and use. Some operating systems
even have simple FTP software already installed. For more details
on FTP see the seperate FTP section of this site.
Once you've established a connection via FTP using your account
login name and password, you should see your remote "home"
directory. This is your space on ice server, which no one can
normally interfere with. files in here are your property and are
owned by you. The files in here are not readable by the rest of
the world.
Within your home directory (sometimes refered to as your root
directory) you will see a subdirectory or folder which has been
specially allocated as your web server root directory. This means
that files and directories within your web server directory are
world accessable and readable (though not normally writable) and
this is where your web space begins! A file put in your web
directory is immediatley accessable by the rest of the world via
a web address or URL.
Which directory is your web directory?
There are currently 3 possibilities as to how your virtual web
server has been set up for you on ice.
1) you may have been given a subdomain of cream.org to use such
as face.cream.org as your web URL so that http://face.cream.org/
is the address of your web server
2) you may have your own domain name being used for your virtual
server so that http://www.irc.org.uk/ for instance, points to
your web server.
3) you may have neither set up, and simply need to use http://ice.cream.org/~yourlogin
as the root of your server. Notice the tilde ~ sign and remember
that most things on the web server are case sensitive.
In the first instance your web directory is called subdomain_docs
so in the example above of face.cream.org the web directory will
be face_docs. A file such as test.html which is inside face_docs
can be viewed by anyone with web access using the URL http://face.cream.org/test.html
Watch out though, if the file is called TEST.HTML (uppercase)
then it is only viewable via the URL http://face.cream.org/TEST.HTML.
ie the file name is case sensitive.
In the second instance you probably will just have a web
directory called docs, or possibly something relating to your
domain name such as irc_docs in the above example. A file such as
test.html inside this directory will be accessable to all with
web access via your URL, in this example http://www.irc.org.uk/test.html
In the third example, your web directory is called public_html
and in some cases this directory might not even yet have been
created for you. If you don't have a subdomain or a domain name,
and you don't see any web folder, try creating a public_html
directory in your home directory and you should find that a file
inside there with the name of test.html for example will be
available to the world using the URL http://ice.cream.org/~yourlogin/test.html
Notice how an URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is made up:
lets look at this URL:
http://ice.cream.org/wibble/fish.html
http://
this part indicates to the browser that the address relates to a
hyper text protocol document (or web page), this is the most
commonly seen beggining to an URL and is infact usually assumed,
and can often be left off when typing it into your browser.
ice.cream.org
this points the browser at the right machine on the Internet
using DNS (see seperate section for explanation of DNS)
/
Everything from / onwards relates to the directory on the server
where the file you are looking for is found. The first / means
"from the web server root" which in your case is the
folder within your home directory.
A file inside a subdirectory called wibble called fish.html might
be referred to as:
http://ice.cream.org/wibble/fish.html
OK so that's about all I have the time and energy to write for
the time being so now it's up to you... time to upload your test.html
text file to your virtual web server using FTP and test that it
works!