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Published by City Farmer, Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture


Setting Up Pages
On The World Wide Web

Learning HTML

Michael Levenston
Executive Director
City Farmer
(C) Copyright: City Farmer 1995


Once you have your account, it's time to learn how to write up your pages.

For the Mac I used a program called BBEdit Lite 3.0 with either BBEdit HTML Extensions or an alternative BBEdit HTML Tools. They can be found on the Internet. There are a number of editing program out there but this program was most often recommended for use on the Mac at the time I began. New programs are uploaded to the Net almost every week so keep a lookout. Lots of discussion about these programs and other web publishing matters can be found on these very active Usenet newsgroups...

HTML are tags that are attached to your text to make it do special things when put up on the Internet. For example, when I put <H1> and </H1> around some text that is a heading, it will show up in a certain font at a specific point size on the Internet. Other tags make photos appear on your page and still others, provide instant links to other people's pages around the world.

html tag graphic

HTML Tagged Page

How do you learn HTML? There are many documents on the WWW that approach the subject from a variety of angles. Read as many of these as you can. Also new books focusing on writing HTML are arriving in bookstores as you read this. Two just out are Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week by Laura Lemay, Sams Publishing, 1995; and HTML For Fun and Profit by Mary E.S. Morris, SunSoft Press, 1995.

MacWeb graphic

Seen on a Web Browser

Netscape, an excellent WWW reader (available free on the Internet as are MacWeb and Mosaic), links you to many HTML teaching sites. When you first open Netscape's Homepage, read "How To Create Web Services" and follow the links.

Also, try copying other people's work by looking at their HTML source code. This can be done simply by going to the appropriate command in the menu of your favourite Web reader.

Easiest of all, find someone who will sit with you and show you the secrets. This will save you hours and hours of "what do I do next?"

There are a few courses being offered, one at UBC's Continuing Education and another at Wimsey, a local Internet provider.

Very simple pages can be created using just a few tags that will make headings, separate paragraphs and format lists. More difficult to learn are the hypertext links which take the reader from one page to another.

All of the 'pages' (files) you write in BBedit must be named and kept in one folder. For instance we have:

(Leave no spaces when you create these names.)

In that same folder can be put all sorts of pictures brought in with a scanner. I took a colour photo of our new garden sign, scanned it into Photoshop in my computer, cropped it, saved it as a Pict, then opened it in a shareware program called GIFConverter. Here I produced a smaller sized image and named it GARDENSIGN.GIF

Now for the real fun and under-documented part of the adventure.

Setting Up Pages
On The World Wide Web

  1. Why Do It?

  2. Finding a Web Server

  3. Learning HTML

  4. Putting Your Stuff in Your Directory

  5. For Windows Users



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Revised October 27, 1996

Published by City Farmer
Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture
cityfarm@unixg.ubc.ca