For this week’s tech task, you’ll be creating a web page using HMTL and TextEdit, then uploading the page to your account on the UMass web server (note that this is different from UDrive). This task has 3 objectives: 1) to hand-code some html, 2) practice uploading files to the web server, and 3) to begin thinking about combining words and images in/as a text.
Your html page should include the following elements:
- the basic tags for any html page: <html>, <head>, <body>
- text: choose a passage (or more) from the course readings
- place <p></p> tags around the paragraphs of your text
- at least one image; include “alt” text*
(you can browse for images in the flickr commons) - comment tags (to give attribution/photo credit for the image, for example)
- a hyperlink to another site**
- a background color (additional color codes here and here)
You may also want to try:
- bulleted lists
- text formatting
- a blockquote <blockquote></blockquote>
- a heading
*First thing is to just try to get an image — any image — in there. Once you’ve worked through the list (or if you’re already comfortable with HTML) you can try selecting an image that you think complements or enhances the meaning of the text.
** You could start by making a link that goes back to your blog. Or you can try more playful kinds of linking — like linking a word in your text to a website somewhere that you think adds something to the reader’s experience of your text.
Resources:
- how to check the settings in TextEdit (before you start coding)
- HTML 4.01/XHTML 1.0 Reference (W3C)
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Uploading:
- access your personal web space using a secure file transfer program like Fetch (free 15 day trial for Macs), WinSCP (free for PCs), or Cyberduck (free/donations for Macs).
- create a folder in your server space; name the folder “891i”
- save your html page as “index.html”, then upload it to the server,
- once it’s uploaded, your page should appear at: http://people.umass.edu/your_username/891i