ssh zoology.ubc.ca

as though you were about to use "pine". But don't use pine. Type:

makeweb

at the prompt. At the end of this process you will have a subdirectory in your home (H:) directory called "www". That is the place to put all of your web stuff.

craft yourself an index.html

file within your www subdirectory. This is the file that people will get when they aim their browsers at http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/~yourID

notify the webmaster

if you would like to have your name on the grads/postdocs/staff personnel page be hyperlinked to your new web creation.

So, you may think that the third step above is really tricky. It isn't. The language of web pages, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is pretty simple. It's just plain text, and you throw in little <tags> to do the formatting. Most tags have a "turn off" tag as well, with a slash in it. So <b>this</b> is how to put a phrase in bold, for example.

To learn HTML it is very helpful to see how other people have written their web pages. In most browsers you can View -> Source to see the raw HTML code. (In "lynx" the backslash \ character will toggle you to and from the source code.) Hey, why not try it on this page?

If you like, you can just edit your HTML text files by hand. On UNIX you may prefer the editor called pico which is the one you are using whenever you run the "pine" mail client. Any text editor will do.

You may prefer an authoring program, like the Composer part of Netscape Communicator, or Adobe PageMill (on ZCU computers). These programs hide the ugly HTML code from you, and are great for generating complicated templates (like tables) that you can choose to hack by hand later. Knowledge of the actual HTML is handy when trying to figure out why something does not behave the way you expect. For high-end web authoring the ZCU has Macromedia Dreamweaver on the machines by the Zoology Coffee Room. It is expensive, but can do "anything", and generates very clean HTML code.
     Some people like Microsoft FrontPage for authoring, although it is NOT recommended by ZCU staff due to Microsoft-only features of the resulting code, and security concerns on both the client and server machines.