March 20, 2015
Dear Everyone:
I’ve been up to my armpits in
HTML pretty much all this week.
If you use your computer to “go to the
Internet”, you probably use an
application known as a “Browser”.
The most common ones are
Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer,
Google’s
Chrome, Firefox and the like.
They all use something called Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML),
which is simply a type of code that tells the Browser what to display on
your computer screen.
Example: What the Browser
sees: <p>Mary had a little
lamb,<br/>His fleece was white as snow,<br/>And everywhere that Mary
went,<br/>The lamb was sure to go.</p>
What the Browser displays on your computer’s screen:
Mary had a little lamb,
His fleece was white as snow,
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.
What the coding tells the Browser:
Silly people can’t read like you and I can, so start a new
paragraph “<p>” and show the first line.
Now insert a line break and start a second line within the first
paragraph “<br/>”. Start a
new line each time you see “<br/>” and finish the paragraph when you see
“</p>”.
Of course, that’s the easy stuff.
Throw in a lot of graphics and things called “headings” and fancy
fonts and the like, and pretty soon all the coding gets pretty
confusing.
I first started learning about HTML back in 1996 (yes,
19 years ago!) My boss
at that time came to me one day and said, “We’re going to have a
Website
and you’re going to do it.”
So I went to a bookstore (remember bookstores?
Buildings you could actually walk into and pick a book down off a
shelf to see if it was what you were looking for?) …and found a book on
HTML.
In time, enterprising people came up with various software applications
that would stick all of that coding in for you.
But you still really needed to know what you were doing to make
it come out the way you wanted it to.
Fast-forward 19 years and my ARMA chapter has a website.
Everybody has a website these days.
But our webmaster, who is strictly voluntary, has been getting
busier and busier with other ARMA-related things, not to mention his own
“consulting” business. So I
sort of volunteered to be his “backup” on our chapter website.
To which he replied:
“Congratulations on your new appointment as Chapter Webmaster!”
And promptly dropped the whole thing in my lap.
At first, I tried to just keep what he had originally done up and
running. But it was becoming
increasingly difficult because, let’s face it!
His coding looks like it’s about 20 years old.
So this week, I started fresh with a Completely New Website.
The software that I use has nearly two dozen templates to use and
a number of them are intended for small businesses.
The software provides the basic framework and you plug in your
own wording, graphics and so on.
I’ve actually done this before, so I recognize some of the roadblocks
when I crash into them again.
“Oh, yeah. Now I
remember! You have to go
that way.”
It’s really kind of fun, once you get it going in the right direction.
“What happens if we put the Sponsor’s logo in that upper corner?
Oops! ‘Back to the
Drawing Board’.”
A word to the wise: Always
make a copy of the original and use the copy to work your way through
everything. Or, as the
Carpenter said: “Measure
twice. Cut once.”
So far, I’ve started A Whole New Website three times, thanks to the
software’s templates. This
last version is beginning to look almost like it’s ready to face the
world. Just a few more
tweaks… Oops!!!
And here we go again…
Love, as always,
Pete
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