Website development notes

Just some notes I have made for myself as I learn how to build web pages and organize a website. The piece on how to code fiction and theatre manuscripts in html may be of interest to some.

Using The Html Editor

I am waffling between the convenience and ease of the WYSIWYG editor available here on my web host and editing directly in html, which offers more control. It is awfully nice just to be able to type something for my website as if I were writing in a word processor. The WYSIWYG editor knows nothing about the final formatting of your page by css. It presents the matter in the simplest way, rather as websites appeared in the 1990s. The WYSIWYG editor does offer the option of editing the source directly, which is sometimes necessary, to edit the material in the head for example.

Unfortunately the WYSIWYG editor does some wierd things to the layout at times which makes it necessary to return to editing the html directly, so I might as well just write html directly.

Fiction and Play Scripts in Html

Formatting in fiction and playscripts is a little different from formatting on a typical web page. Web paragraphs are separated by a blank line, and the first line of the paragraph is not indented. Fiction and play scripts require something different. Let's deal with fiction first.

Coding Fiction In HTML and CSS

In a novel there is no blank line between paragraphs and the first line of all paragraphs except the first in a chapter or section of a chapter is indented by a small amount. This means we have two kinds of paragraph to code. We do this by declaring two paragraph classes in the html, and defining each class in our style.css file, which will reside in the same folder as our html file.

Unify Your Web Site With Page Templates

Large commercial web sites maintain a consistent look and feel over thousands of pages by using applications that generate web pages on the fly, including logos, banners, and navigation bars.

This same technology is available to the small website through Wordpress and other content management systems, but if, like me, you prefer to write html from scratch, you do want all of your pages to have the same look and principal navigation bar. The way to achieve this is to base every page on your site on your home page, that is your index.html page.

Html is not so difficult

Coding in html and css is not so very difficult. I am no expert, but with the help of a book or two, and some online tutorials, I have been able to make a fairly simple but functional and, importantly, "responsive" website from scratch.

Web Writing Is Newspaper Writing

Writing for the web has to be simple and direct. You have to tell the reader immediately what your article is about, and get the important points you want to make across in the first few paragraphs. You have to keep the paragraphs short, and it helps to break up your text with images to provide visual interest and relief for the eye.

Organizing Your Website Files

For anything more than a very simple website you will almost certainly be creating a number of html files, and will also have a number of images and other media files you will want to include with your web pages. You may also create more than one CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. All these files can eventually create a terrible jumble, in which it is difficult to find anything, unless you impose some kind of organization on them.

Html for keeping your notes

Hypertext Markup Language, or html, is not just for creating websites, or ebooks. Html is an excellent all round markup language for use in a computer environment. If your needs are simple, the html you write can be simple too, and require very little effort to make or maintain.

Writing On A Typewriter For The Computer

You may have seen a video of a typewriter that someone has fitted with electrical contacts for typing into a computer as you would with a more conventional keyboard. At least you might have if you spent as much time as I have researching typewriters on the Internet. That is certainly one way of using an old typewriter as a writing tool and entering the data into a digital file as well.. There is an easier and less...er...invasive way to accomplish the same thing.

Typewriter To Computer Part Two

Using Optical Text Recognition, OCR, you can get an old fashioned typewritten page easily into an editable digital form. But what do you do with it then? A plain text file can be useful, and is sometimes the best form for a document, especially if you are sending it by email. However it is usual to present documents in a more attractive form, with styling and perhaps images added, and in the form of a pdf, an ebook, or an html document for viewing in a browser.

Websites Within Websites Using Sub-folders

There is no need to own more than one real domain, or purchase more than one hosting plan to publish a number of different "websites". You can create sub-domains from your original domain, the number being limited by the terms of the account you have with your hosting provider. However you really don't even need sub-domains. You can create virtual websites within your main website using sub-folders, and their number is limited only by the storage you have available with your account.

Efficiently Editing Html Files

In editing html files it is important to remember that the browser ignores blank lines and line returns. It only cares about html tags and what they tell it about the structure of the file. can type your paragraph text, for example, in short lines, as short as you wish, and the browser will gather them all together and present them as one unified paragraph.

Markdown for Distraction-free Web writing

Writing directly into html, inserting tags as you go, is not horrendously difficult. It can be a little distracting, however, and annoying. Simplified markup languages, of which Markdown, created by John Gruber, has become the best known, and probably the most widely used, provide a shorthand for the more complex syntax of html and other markup languages. The goal of Markdown is to create a writing environment as free of distraction as possible and still produce an html document at the end of the process.

Daring Fireball- Home of Markdown

Using Httrack To Mirror A Website

I have been using an application called httrack for a few days to make a local mirror of my website, and find it perfect for my needs and easy to use.

On my Debian Linux system I simply used apt-get install to install httrack. It is a tiny download. There are versions I believe for all operating systems. Some are graphical, although I just use a simple one line command in a terminal to invoke httrack.

The Five Gigabyte Universe

I have the most basic account with the hosting provider for my website. With the account comes five gigabytes of storage , which doesn't sound like much perhaps in these days of the multi-terabyte harddrives, but it is more than an ocean of space for me. It is a universe of space I could never fill in a lifetime of writing.