Creating a Character Web Page

[kiania]

Originally posted by Kraxe
Hmm, now I'm suddenly all for putting Gir's Doom song on infinite loop on Kraxe's website. Maybe I should create a special torture room for it...

Oooo, the penalty for that would be your own doom! Thats taking torture to an entirely new level of whimpering crying, and begging for it to all be over soon!

[Shadarach]

I think it would not be that difficult to write a short piece of CSS or javascript that would behave like the play button on an mP3 player.

In fact I will see what I can write myself.

And you know, probably forget why I was doing it and not have anything to show in a couple of weeks time, but eh..

Or I could spend 2 minutes on the internet and steal it.

[Ismenia]

So I made my pretty new site.. got it hosted on batcave.net. I just got an email a few days ago that Batcave is no longer doing free hosting, so my site will be gone on July 10th.

Anyone know of any other free webhosting sites? Or do I need to start from scratch again?

[Ysadri]

Have you checked with your isp? Often, a small amount of webspace is included with your internet access. I have dsl through Verizon, and I pay less than $30/month for dsl and 100mg of space.

[Rosuav]

I got the same email Ismenia, and went looking for other hosts. So far the bestlooking option is http://www.freehostingnow.com/ (my site at http://rosuav.freehostingnow.com/ has no content yet, but it's looking OK so content will come soon). They offer web upload and FTP, but when I tried the FTP option, it gave me Too Many Users (50) every time. Might be a seasonal thing, but there might be a problem with their FTP. Web upload looks OK though. And they don't stick ads all over your pages.

The docs keep pressuring you to upgrade, but it seems to be all "You want ? Upgrade and you can get it!" - so a simple site can stay free.

BTW Ysadri, good point. A lot of ISPs do offer a little bit of web space. But megabytes is MB not mg (milligrams), although 100MB probably weighs about 100mg at today's hard disk sizes

[Shadarach]

If you need any help with the nuts and bolts of web site design and what not, drop me a line. Obviously I am going to have to take a good long look at my own character website before I get serious about helping anyone else with theirs but.. I at least have some idea these days.

[Khaosai]

I haven't used free hosting in years, so I wont be able to help out in that regard.

However I do have some words for all you HTML newbies. Things like dreamweaver and frontpage do take a learning curve that I find that is a waste of time. For people who have a hard time visualizing what their site is going to look like, I can totally understand that when you look at code, it's just jargin, so I cannot blame you for wanting a visual interface to work with.

Keep in mind, the time it takes you to learn FrontPage to it's potential, you could know HTML, and be able to do the same things but not be constricted by FrontPage's interface. That is why more experienced people often suggest this route. Don't be discouraged and think your doing the wrong thing by doing things that way.



A great tool for people learning to code HTML, is using a proper text editor. There is a text editor called TextPad, this is an AWESOME tool for you newbies, why? because it colorizes the text based on your input, so if you don't close a tag, it shows you visually, and you can correct very common typos and mistakes easily, without pulling your hair out only find out your third line in the document has a unclosed P tag or something. I myself use notepad currently, just because I haven't bothered to go get Textpad on my new PC yet. but you can get TextPad here: http://www.textpad.com

Websites are great tools to learn basics, however when there's something you want to replicate you've seen on another website, it really helps to have a person who understands the code well. So if there are any webdesign related questions, I would be more than happy to help you out.


As for what I would like to see on character websites? I really like logs of memorable things people have done, and original artwork.

Thinks I dislike seeing though: Myspace pages, un-original animated gifs, mouse-cursor followers, pretty much anything done using DHTML, image effects done using javascript (water reflections, fade in/outs.

[Ismenia]

Originally posted by Rosuav
I got the same email Ismenia, and went looking for other hosts. So far the bestlooking option is http://www.freehostingnow.com/ (my site at http://rosuav.freehostingnow.com/ has no content yet, but it's looking OK so content will come soon). They offer web upload and FTP, but when I tried the FTP option, it gave me Too Many Users (50) every time. Might be a seasonal thing, but there might be a problem with their FTP. Web upload looks OK though. And they don't stick ads all over your pages.

The docs keep pressuring you to upgrade, but it seems to be all "You want ? Upgrade and you can get it!" - so a simple site can stay free.

BTW Ysadri, good point. A lot of ISPs do offer a little bit of web space. But megabytes is MB not mg (milligrams), although 100MB probably weighs about 100mg at today's hard disk sizes

Thanks! Let me know what you think of it Ros and I will maybe join up. Great idea Ysadri! I think Road Runner does have free hosting. I will have to look into it.

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Khaosai
However I do have some words for all you HTML newbies. Things like dreamweaver and frontpage do take a learning curve that I find that is a waste of time. ... Keep in mind, the time it takes you to learn FrontPage to it's potential, you could know HTML, and be able to do the same things but not be constricted by FrontPage's interface. ... A great tool for people learning to code HTML, is using a proper text editor.

Absolutely. Absolutely. A text editor is the best way to do your HTML work, because then you don't get the problem of little bits of text in the wrong style because you didn't select it when you clicked "Shrink Font" or something. There's pitfalls in everything, WYSIWYG editing is never going to eliminate them.

The one thing that I'd really like in this sort of work is a one-key "Show me how this looks" command - when I'm developing applications, I want F5 (or Ctrl-Alt-Shift - yes, that is a single key, the way I use it!) to build and run; should be possible to do the same for HTML work. In fact - it IS possible, but if it's not integrated into your editor, it'd need a separate program, and you'd need to keep them in sync somehow. (Hmm. I just got an idea... I could write a program that integrates with anything that puts the filename in the title. If people are interested, post or PM me and I might look at writing it.)

There is a text editor called TextPad, this is an AWESOME tool for you newbies

I keep hearing about it, never got around to trying it. For my coding work, I use the OS/2 system editor (it's just called "e"), or if I'm on Windows, viw from the Open Watcom (www.openwatcom.org) environment. The latter is better suited to C++ than HTML, but it does the job.

Real man HTML coding:
telnet ftp.host.com 21
put filename.html