To publish your documents on the web you will need some tools and techniques. This assumes that your personal platform is an IBM PC running windows and your target environment runs the Netscape web server suite or something equivalent.
You will need to prepare documents. This can be a word processor like Microsoft Word, a browser like Netscape, or a specialized web tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver. You can prepare html documents with any of these. With the full version Adobe Acrobat you can also create and publish pdf files. These are read with the Acrobat Reader which is free from Adobe.
You will need an account on the target machine. This can be an account provided by Pace Academic Computing or can be another machine to which you have access and which is permanently connected to the internet. Your account on this machine will provide you some disk space in a home directory. Within this directory you should create a sub directory named public_html. If your target machine runs the UNIX operating system you need to be aware that file names are case sensitive, so the directory name needs to be created with all lower case letters. All of your web documents will be placed in this public_html directory. Otherwise they will not be visible on the web.
You will need a way to move documents from the personal platform on which you create the documents to the target machine. If your personal machine is a PC then ws_ftp is a good choice for this.
You may need an image editing program that can save files in gif and jpeg formats. Paintshop Pro will do this. There are cheaper alternatives such as Graphic Workshop. These are available from the TUCOWS Image Editors section. GIF is a good format for line drawings and graphics. JPEG is much better for photographs. The difference is in the encoding mechanism and these two common formats are specialized for these two purposes.
TUCOWS has many shareware programs of all kinds for many different platforms.
If you are going to put an extensive web site together (anything more than just a home page) then you want to think about its design. You can find a pattern language for web site design at the Anamorph site. While the information there is a bit dated now, most of it is valuable and worth thinking about in any case. The site was created by Robert Orenstein.
Recent versions of Microsoft Word can create html documents directly. There are a few things you should know about this process. If you use outline mode to create the document originally, it will probably look better when published. If you create graphics using the built in graphics tools, they won't export properly unless you apply an extra step. Completely select any graphic you create within Word and cut it out (ctrl-x). Then select Paste Special from the edit menu and repaste it as a Picture. When you are done with your document you can save it as html from the File menu. Any properly created graphics will be exported as gif files as part of the translation process. The html file must stay together with these gif files to be properly viewed as the graphics are in these files and not in the html files themselves.
If you want to put portions of documents created outside Word into your web documents you can do this a variety of ways. Cutting from the other application and pasting into Word may work, but it may be safer to Paste Special as a Picture. You can also capture a screen with Printscreen key and then paste the results into Paint or another image editing program for edits. When you are satisfied with the results, copy it from Paint and paste it into Word. When you Save as HTML, these images will be converted to gif files.
Once you have html files and associated gif files you need to copy them to the target environment. You can use ws_ftp to do this. Connect to the target machine and copy the files to public_html or to some subdirectory of that one.
You can find simple instructions for publishing your documents at http://webpage.pace.edu/.
If the public_html directory or any subdirectory has a file named index.html then that file will be shown when any web surfer tries to connect to that directory or subdirectory. Every directory you create should probably have such a file. If it does not then the directory and its files can be directly accessed and downloaded, rather than viewed. In fact a good plan for your target setup is to put files that are often viewed together into the same subdirectory of public_html and name the main document of the group index.html.
HTML documents can be created directly using the Composer feature of Netscape Communicator. Even better results can be obtained with a specialized tool such as Dreamweaver.
You can also learn to build web pages directly in HTML. The University of Illinois publishes a Beginners Guide to HTML that is very complete.
Here is another document that is intended for web novices. It has additional information you may find useful.
Last Updated: April 17, 2001