This document sketches the steps for publishing a web page for the Robotic Design Studio course. Each group is expected to create a page that serves as an on-line exhibit for their project. The page should include:
In addition to the group web page, you are encouraged to experiment with creating a personal web page.
There are two key steps for publishing a web page:
We cover these steps in turn.
Web pages are files that are written in a language called the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Although not difficult to learn, HTML is tedious to use. Fortunately, there are tools that simplify the creation of HTML documents by hiding the nasty details of HTML behind a familiar point-and-click user interface.
The web page creation software we shall use in this course is Claris Home Page. There are key-servered versions of Claris Home Page installed on all the PCs in the robot lab. (There is also a key-servered version of Claris Home Page for public-cluster PCs and Macs on campus.) To invoke Claris Home Page, navigate from the start button as follows:
Start
Programs
Claris Home Page 2.0
Claris Home Page
This will create a web page editing window that is similar in many respects to familiar document editing programs like Microsoft Word. In the editor window, you can type text (in all sorts of different formats), include images, make links to other web pages, make bulleted or itemized lists, insert tables, etc. For details, read the on-line CWIS documentation for Claris home page. If you have questions, ask Robbie, Lyn, or a knowledgeable classmate.When done editing your document, you should save it to a convenient location on the PC C: drive or to a floppy disk (A: drive).
Every once in a while, you may find it helpful to use HTML directly rather than through Claris Home Page. The CWIS documentation on HTML is a good starting point for finding out about HTML.
An unfortunate glitch: we expected that it would be trivial to include the JPEG images produced by the Sony digital camera in a Claris Home Page document. Unfortunately, Claris Home Page has difficulty understanding the images on the digital camera disks. It is necessary to use the PaintshopPro program on the PC or the GraphicConverter program on the Mac to prepare the digital camera images for inclusion in a Claris Home Page document. All you need to do is open the image file in these applications and save it as a JPEG image.
No one else can see the web page you created in the previous step unless you install it in on a web server. A web server is a machine that speaks a particular protocol (called HTTP = HyperText Transfer Protocol) that allows it to send web pages to browsers on other web machines.
The web server we will be using for this course is a machine named nike.wellesley.edu. All of you have been given an account on this machine. See the Nike page for details. Your account has a special public_html directory where you publish your web page for the world to see:
It is for this reason that many people use index.html as the name for their home page.
You can transfer a file to Nike using a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client such as Winsock-FTP (from PCs) and Fetch (from Macs). Follow the above links for details.
Once you have transferred a web page to your public_html directory on Nike, you can view it from any web browser, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer, as described above. For group project pages, we recommend that the pages go in the public_html directory of one of the students, and that each member of the project include a link to the project page(s) from her home page (i.e., index.html).