Group project Step 3 - putting it into a web page

[sarettah]

Let's talk about html a little bit.

HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language

WW3 Consortium ) - controls HTML standards
Breakdown of the various html statements and parts
Beginners guide to HTML

HTML is a document language, not a programming language. It exists to provide a standard for presentation of documents.

An HTML document consists of 3 main parts:

1. The document itself (begins with ends with )
2. The head of the document (begins with ends with )
3. The body of the document (begins with ends with )

So, whenever we are writing html we start at the top of a text document with a tag.

The head section describes the document. Within the head section are various directives that you can pass to a browser to tell it what the document is.

The first tag I usually use in the head section is the title tag:



Most browsers pick up the title tag and display it at the top of the browser window.

Most of your other tags in the head section are META tags. META tags are not displayed by the browser, they pass information to "non humans" ie; browsers, search engines, the like.

The two META tags I always use are the description tag and the keywords tag.




The body of the document is the part that is displayed in the browser. This is where all the cool stuff happens


So, our nest step is to "tag up" some of the code we created earlier.

Let's use the ssi_include file we created earlier as our working file.

In your editor open up the ssi_include.shtml file.

In between the open and close head tags





Now, a general rule I follow is to make sure that my title, description or keywords do not go beyond 254 characters in length. I don't know if this is a diehard rule or not, but it has always worked for me.

Another general rule I follow is to make sure that whatever keywords I feature in the keywords meta tag also appear somewhere in the body of my text and that I don't repeat keywords anywhere in the keywords tag more than 3 times to avoid looking too spammy to a spider. (SEO guys will know these rules a whole lot better than me)

I also make sure to get my most important keywords up into my description.

ie:









There are many other meta tags that can and should be used in a document. I would consider these to be the minimum for anything you want a spider to search.

a nice little meta tag introduction is at http://searchenginewatch.com/webmast...le.php/2167931

[sarettah]

The body of the html document

Between the body tags of the html document is where all the action is. The body is comprised of various "tags" and text. The tags control the appearance of the document and can call various "objects" into the document.

Each tag may have certain "properties" that can be controlled within the tag itself.

There are many different tags and properties that can be used and I am certainly not going to even try to go through all of them here.

Some tags can be browser specific, less so now than a couple of years ago, but you still may come across a tag that acts one way in IE and another way in Netscape or Firefox or that is ignored completely by certain browsers.

some guides: HTML 4.0 Tags
A list of HTML tags
An HTML Tags chart - watch the fucking popup in front
Barebones guide - tags by functionality

We will be doing a very simple page at first just to get used to the tags and such.

Once again, download and open your ssi_include version that you created and should now have keyworded and titled.

Right after the tag

Website Title

Here are today's galleries:

Then make sure your include file line is here

Then we should have the close body and close html tags:



Save the file, upload it and then take a look at it in the browser.

example: http://www.sexeducatoon.com/ssi_include1.shtml

Ok, now, what did we tell it to do:


This tells the browser to put anything between this and the close center tag into the center of the browser window.

This tells the browser to put the text that follow in headline format at the biggest size (could be anywhere from H1 to H6 with 1 being the biggest)

This closes the H1 tag - tells the browser to stop headline size 1 right here

This tells the browser to put the text that follow in headline format at the next biggest size.

This closes the H2 tag - tells the browser to stop headline size 2 right here


This closes the center tag - tells the browser to stop centering stuff right here.

If you do a "View source" of your webpage (yes, it is now a webpage) yopu will see some additional code. This code is what was pulled in from the remote thumbs file.

[sarettah]

So, now we have a very basic tgp webpage built.

Now we have to go turn it on in remotethumbs.

Go back to remotethumbs.
Go to My Templates
on the right hand side of the screen on the same line as your yemplate, you will see a link to "switch online", click it.

Now your gallery updates are live. Every day at what ever time you told it to, remotethumbs will automatically update the template file on your server.

Because we use an include to pull the file in, the page will automatically pull in the most current file.

Voila, auto updating TGP page.

So, I guess we're done...........
















Just kidding

Now we need to go make this a website. We need to make the page a better looking page, add some color, some sponsor links, some banners, ads all the cool stuff.

We will do that as the next step..............