Entries from May 2008 ↓

HTML is a formatting language. That means that it affects how what you write appears on the page. You break it up into chunks and assign “markup” to them, which tells the browser how to present it to the viewer. And you mark up the text by adding “tags”.

Definition

formatting

Changing the appearance of plain text to make it easier to read, giving it more impact through the use of headers, paragraphs, line breaks, etc.

markup

Code you add to plain text to tell the browser how it divides up into different parts by purpose or appearance.

HTML tags

Specific snippets of code added to plain text to make a browser interpret or display different sections in different ways.

Microsoft Word produces attractive documents for you as you work. It uses markup to do this, though the markup is invisible to you. Notepad produces plain text documents. There is no markup. However, many designers type web documents in plain text, adding tags in afterward or as they go. When they save these documents as .html, they open in a browser window as a completed document, not one long paragraph of plain text with some code showing.

Most tags have a beginning tag before the chunk of text you want to format and an end tag after it. There’s not an HTML tag called ‘tag’. But if there was, this is what it would look like:

<tag>Format Me!</tag>
Because there’s not a tag called ‘tag’, if I were to put this into an HTML document, the browser would ignore the tags. They would not show in the browser window. Anything between ‘<’ and >’ that the browser does not recognize will be ignored. So if you spell your tags wrong, they won’t work. It’s really easy to spell them wrong, so if you want to do HTML, you’re going to have to start proofreading carefully.

Some tags do not have a separate end tag. All the work happens within the one tag.

<tag=”Tag!”> or <tag=”Tag!” />
mean the same thing. We use the first one to format on Niteflirt to save characters. The second one is a little more web-friendly.

The last thing to remember about tags is that you have to nest them properly. Tags that overlap can do all kinds of crazy things to your page. This is easy to do properly when you’re writing it in the first place, and much harder to figure out when the page is all written and seriously messed up.

You can see that the lines cross in the second one. That’s not nested.

Assignment

You can look at the source code for any page online, but most pages nowadays have plenty of stuff in the source code that is not HTML. You might find that really confusing. So I have made a page from this tutorial. It doesn’t look exactly the same as it does here, because WordPress blogs add formatting. On that page, only the markup in the code is operating to format the page.
See this page in plain HTML.

Now go to the menubar. Click View => Source. A window or tab should open showing you the source code. Look at how the tags enclose pieces of text. Everything in this window—and much more—will become clear by the time you finish this series of lessons.

Next lesson: Headers and Subheaders

There are a lot of reasons why you need to learn html;

• There’s no other way to format a listing. Niteflirt requires html for formatting a listing.
• You want to do it for free, rather than paying somebody to make your listings or buying software.
• Html is not rocket science. It may look like incomprehensible gobbledegook on the source code page, but writing it is just applying a series of simple rules.
• Doing your first html page will make you feel like a rocket scientist. Mastering a new technique just makes you feel brilliant.
• There are so many free editors you can’t figure out which to download.
• Learning to use a free html editor is as hard in many ways as learning html. It can be extremely confusing. Not only that, but you will probably go through a series of html editors, get stuck, and try another one. The amount of effort involved with doing that is greater than learning simple html.
• Code editors write for the web. Niteflirt has a special type of html that will not accept many things that will work fine on a webpage of your own.
• Code editors add stuff to your code to make changes. If you play with it a lot, you can end up going over the Niteflirt character limit while your listing is still quite small.
• Code editors are intended to save you work by making decisions for you. Some of the things they decide you want are not things you want, and you may not be able to change it back without going into the code to delete what the editor put in.
• Even if you don’t care about formatting, you’ll need html to insert photos and graphic images into your listing.
• When you buy a purchased template, it usually comes with instructions that assume you understand something about html. If you do not, you may be unable to install the template and put in your content. Buying a template means you are saving money by agreeing to set it up yourself. The designer may be willing to help you if she has time. Some designers don’t have the time, and in any case if you don’t know any html, the designer isn’t obligated to spend unlimited time teaching it to you so that you will understand how to follow standard setup instructions.
• Troubleshooting your own work: when things go wrong, as they will, you need to be able to figure out what the problem is and fix it quickly, so you can get your listing working again.
• If you can make a simple Niteflirt listing, you can make a simple webpage.

Okay, I’m sure there’s a bunch more reasons, and if I think of them after the caffeine takes effect, I will edit them in. But right now I want to introduce a little project to you. I’ve made a “listing” on Niteflirt with no html whatever. You will certainly recognize the type. Some of you may have listings that still look like this.

We’ll be fixing this up step by step. This will not be a complete web design course, or even a complete html course. It will teach you what you need to know to fix your listing up pretty.

Next chapter: titles and paragraphs.

I see this question a lot. The trick is in understanding that Niteflirt has two site search engines. One searches through listing text, and the other searches only flirt names. So if you type a flirtname that is made up of common words into the regular search box, you could get back a list of thousands of listings that contain any of those words. Obviously this situation would not be helpful.

The other is a flirtname-specific search box. If you type the flirt’s name in there, you may come up with a list that has only the listings of the flirt you are looking for, or the list might have hundreds of flirtnames on it. For some reason a long list like this is not sorted so that exact matches come first.

But if you put quotation marks around the name, now you should only get a list of names that contain all the words as the one you are searching for.

The other way to find a flirt is to type their name in the address bar of your browser right after the sitename, like so:



and you are there, whether or not the flirt has listings. If you want to email her, there is a Send Email link on her home page and every listing page, provided she has listings approved. You can’t email members who are not on your customer list until they have listings approved.

It’s pretty simple if you look at the picture. The more you charge, the higher percentage you net, and you make more per hour. A lot more.

I’m trying out a new Google/Yahoo video thing. There’s supposed to be tutorials in there, but it’s kind of hard to target. Some of it’s really cool and useful, some of it’s entertaining, and some of it is a little weird. I couldn’t just get photoshop videos, so you’ll just have to be entertained.

Yes, we talked about this before. We covered some things in detail, in particular how to choose a host that will grow with you. I related the issue of how a free webhost can hold you back and prevent you from doing lots of the things you might want to do, even if they do permit adult.

Once again here I’m going to put in a plug for the freedom you get when you can host images on your own site and manage them as you please.

Even if all you want is to make a blog right now, putting it on your own website is a smart move. You can still drop blogs around here and there, so long as you’re staying within the tos of the free blog hosts. But for the blog that represents you, you’re putting a lot of work in on it. It should be yours, to do with as you wish.

If you’re going to put that much work in on it, you should have the option of making it a real site.

So here’s the story I’d like to relate to you. I spent much of this weekend installing a new website for a girlfriend who previously had a bunch of very strange pages created by a customer who knew nothing about web design or adult web design for PSO. Those pages were not only ugly in a 1992 sort of way, but they didn’t work right. You’d have to click a button several times to get a “mouseover” to work so the photo would show, instead of a large blank space. It was kind of a maze to get to her existing blogs, which were stuck with the default wordpress theme.

So I replaced the entry page with a really pretty one, the main page with one that links directly to her new blogs. Drop dead gorgeous if I do say so myself. And the blogs are very pretty, too.

Unfortunately, due to her choice of server, there were several problems that needed to be worked out. We never were able to change one of her settings, which would be necessary to get maximum indexing for her blogs.

But the big deal is that she selected this host because it looked like it would be good for a beginner. They had some kind of site builder, an uploader of sorts, and some other cool stuff that no longer works for her because her new computer has Vista. And the stuff she thought was going to save her time and money? While it made it harder (read: more work) for me, the biggest problem was making the blogs work right.

After a discussion on the forums:

Things could have been worse. At least she had apache/linux hosting. If she had chosen Windows hosting, as many “starter webhosts” offer, she would have had to move to another server to do what she wanted. You don’t want a Windows server. Just take my word for it.

If you have to pay somebody to install a blog for you, that’s an hour’s work, if nothing goes wrong. If there’s a problem, it can take several hours for somebody who knows what they’re doing to sort out the issue and fix it.

The problem is that when you pick a free wordpress theme, you may be getting something highly standard, or you may be getting something that seemed like a good idea at the time to the designer. Fixing a misbehaving theme can be a real pain. And none of this should be necessary, because if you choose a webhost that has simplified installation for wordpress, you click and you are ready. You are provided with a large number of themes that are ready to use. Dreamhost has “One click” installs for wordpress blogs and lots of other popular installations. On the rare occasions when I had issues, it was from upgrading very old blogs, and they went out of their way to fix them for me.

If my girlfriend had had to pay me for the time I spent straightening out her blog issues, she’d be out of money right now. The little bit of convenience back at the beginning that saved her doing research and asking for help would have ended up costing her a load of money in the end.

For those of you who are still nervous about what it means to use FTP to upload files and images to your website, I’ll be writing a little tutorial on that shortly. It has to be little. It’s a lot simpler than you could ever imagine.