Niv & the new website

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 2:27 pm

I'm getting myself a website, at last. The only problem is that my HTML skills aren't as sharp as they used to be. Does anyone have a suggestion towards where I can:

- find some website building freeware
or
- brush up on my HTML

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 2:33 pm

great thread Niveous, I'll be watching this one, I fear my skills are worse than yours.

j$ · Post by j$ » Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:11 pm

This should in 'help & how to' shouldn't it? Unless you're saying your website's gonna be fit for monkey business?

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:15 pm

True. But it's a little late unless the powers that be can move it.

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:18 pm

Don't take this the wrong way, please.

I recommend HTML For Dummies.

Seriously, I have a copy of it and it's as useful as anything I've found on the subject, at least at the basic level. As a matter of fact, you can borrow my dog-eared copy if you want, I'll send it to you.

It might be worth looking at my web site though. If you think it looks horrid, then maybe my advice isn't that worthwhile.

Kamakura · Post by **Kamakura** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 3:48 am

Get Dreamweaver. On a basic wysiwyg level it's brilliant, and if you want to hand code it's also no problem (or a mixture of the 2). Anyone who has used dtp should have no problems. It also has a built in ftp section to upload your site to the server.
As Jim say's html for dummies is a very good book.

j$ · Post by j$ » Thu Feb 17, 2005 4:37 am

Yeah, Dreamweaver is good. Frontpage is also not bad at all for an introductory thing; if you are used to Word, it's almost exactly the same concept. You can also use page designers like Yahoo Pagebuilder then copy out the html through file editor. That will work most times and it's free - you might need to readjust a few minor things in the code.

HTML is pretty straight-forward though, imo. And you can learn as you go, which is always good

j$

Kamakura · Post by **Kamakura** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:09 am

Frontpage sucks big time. I can't abide the damn program, won't have it in the house, and if it turned up for lunch I would be on holiday. Abroad.
A day in Iraq would be better than an evening with Frontpage.

j$ · Post by j$ » Thu Feb 17, 2005 5:17 am

Kamakura wrote:Frontpage sucks big time. I can't abide the damn program, won't have it in the house, and if it turned up for lunch I would be on holiday. Abroad.
A day in Iraq would be better than an evening with Frontpage.

It's limited - I wouldnt reccommend it to anyone who knows what they're doing. But as a transition from DTP to WP it serves a purpose. And FP express comes free on all windows packages of a certain age.

To be honest, Dreamweaver is a little bit poncy for my tastes. It does lots of pretty things but it's fairly user-unfriendly (what a surprise, right?) and the look of what it produces is just as 'branded' as frontpage .. imo ...

Would a day with Frontpage be better than an evening in Iraq?

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 7:07 am

I've been using Adobe Go Live, seems pretty easy to use, and feels like there is lots of horsepower under the hood for whenever I decide to learn how to tap into it.

How does it rank for all you "intheknow" people?

Kamakura · Post by **Kamakura** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 9:52 am

j$ wrote:To be honest, Dreamweaver is a little bit poncy for my tastes.

My, what badinage. If you're implying those who prefer the most excellent Dreamwever are ponces, then I'll buy some tight satin trousers. Hmm.

j$ wrote:Would a day with Frontpage be better than an evening in Iraq?

No. Or a week, or indeed an enternity.

If you are going to get into web design, you might as well start using a decent piece of software. Macromedia also make Flash, Fireworks, and Freehand. They come bundled together in a package called 'Studio MX'.
I don't know Go Live.
BUT FRONTPAGE SUCKS! imo.

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 10:02 am

but how do you really feel about it?

king_arthur · Post by **king_arthur** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 10:19 am

If you buy the "DreamWeaver MX 2004 Hands-On-Training" book by Green & Weinman, it comes with a "trial version" of all four parts of the DW suite, for either Mac or PC. It's also a pretty decent book about the products. Disclaimer: I haven't actually installed the tv's yet, I'm waiting until a little further into the semester when I'll be doing lots of dreamweaving and having it on the home computer will save me trips to school. Or the day when I decide I should work through "Learn Flash in 21 Days" in 21 hours...

I have also heard (but not verified) that DreamWeaver basically saves its files in XHTML, meaning that you can, in theory, import a FrontPage project into DW, or vice versa. I'm sure some metadata gets lost in the process, but at least in terms of being able to take somebody else's FP site and work on it in DW and save it back in a form where they can take it back over, that seems like a pretty cool thing. Anybody confirm / refute this?

That said, my favorite HTML editing program is still "vi." Or "wordpad."

I would include "textedit" on the Mac in that list, except that when I open a .html file in textedit, it shows it to me as the webpage, not the underlying code. I.e., if there are images in the HTML code, it shows me the actual picture, not the img tag and arguments. That is even true if I rename the file "index.txt" or whatever... Any Mac gurus here know how to fix that? To me, this is unacceptable behavior for a program called "textedit..."

To modify HTML code directly on a Mac, I had to open it in DreamWeaver and look at the "code view," and even then, if I tried to do a global search and replace on some code, it would only apply the changes to the displayed text. I.e., I had a bunch of img tags with height=500 in them and I wanted to change that to height=700. Because the "500" was inside the tag, the DW search and replace wouldn't change it, I had to do each one manually...

Charles

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 10:29 am

Not knowing where else to put this, I'll say it here.

Niveous. Your new avatar is brutal!

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 10:34 am

Wow. My head is spinning from reading that KA post. I am so clueless in this field

But at least my head feels better than BJ Whitmer's. He's the unlucky guy in my avatar.

Eric Y. · Post by **Eric Y.** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 10:58 am

dear anybody who wants to learn about html. also a bit of javascript.

i highly highly recommend this website
http://www.pageresource.com

they have awesome, really easy to follow tutorials on all sorts of html stuff. i learned amazing amounts of stuff from that website.

also once you understand all the basic stuff, you can find a complete listing of html tags and attributes here
http://www.werbach.com/barebones

which is also immensely helpful. it includes information about which browsers and versions support various functions...

LMNOP · Post by **LMNOP** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:57 am

I learned everything I needed to know about HTML from Annabella.

I prefer to hand-code but moved from Notepad to Easy HTML a few years back. Good previews and it automatically color-codes the tags which makes it easier on the eyes. It's got buttons for various things but I pretty much don't use them.

I should point out that the author's website now asks you to buy a one-year $20 membership to download programs while the link I provided seems to bypass this requirement. It used to be free. To atone for providing the "free" link, I'll join myself, having easily received $20 worth of utility in the past five years or so.

thehipcola · Post by **thehipcola** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:31 pm

jimtyrrell wrote:Not knowing where else to put this, I'll say it here.

Niveous. Your new avatar is brutal!

I really have to point out the exuberance of the official, just before the end of the clip...he's launching to make that call!

Great avatar!

john m · Post by **john m** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:45 pm

Niveous, that's the baddest Vertebreaker I've ever seen. It's still not quite as cool as the Canadian Destroyer, but damn, that's a great finisher. I wish Ring of Honor was available here.

jack · Post by **jack** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:47 pm

i mostly use dreamweaver these days but also use GoLive on occasion. they are pretty similar. the UI is a bit different but GoLive is pretty standard adobe UI and dreamweaver is standard macromedia UI. i also usually end up dabbling in the code or BB edit as that's the way i learned.

i HIGHLY recommend learning HTML tags and code in wordpad or a non-WYSIWYG editor. it's like the difference between learning how to drive an automatic and learning how to drive a shift. editor's only give you so many modification options but if you know how to code at a basic level, you have the map.

personally, i think most people would be better off creating personal websites from blogger or live journal or some other free account and use that as their "homepage", as it gives the user the ability to have some dynamic content integration (which would otherwise require more advanced web programming skills, things like javascript, XML, CSS, PHP, etc.) and have a UI that doesn't force them to really know the backend. all the user buildout is done through forms and applets.

you'll still need to have server space to store your files and you can link to as many external pages as you like. of course if you don't care about having a blog, and your idea of a site is small, i'd say keep it simple in html. i'm sure there are 30 day demos available for dreamweaver and golive from the adobe/macromedia sites. download them and play with them. and use the code view option. look at the structure and tags. select all. copy. open wordpad. paste. you get the idea.......

Niveous · Post by **Niveous** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 1:05 pm

Leaf: my favorite part of my avatar is how much the ring bounces upon collision. It's as if Homicide (the person doing the move) is going to make the ring cave.

Doc Worm, ROH is gonna be in Dayton on the 25th.

jimtyrrell · Post by **jimtyrrell** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 1:08 pm

So... is this BJ fellow dead now, or what? I know little to nothing about wrestling, but that sure looks fatal...