How to set-up and administer your web site

Internet is fun and easy to use. You may want to have your own web site. You can do this as an independent individual, or you can do this as part of our dyad community. Contained here is information to help you do what you want without spending much money.

  1. Decide what you want to say - this can be done on paper or with a word processor.
  2. Do you need a web site?
  3. Find a computer. (Free Library service and free e-mail to start)
  4. Find a dial up service to get to internet.
  5. Build a web page on your computers hard disk
  6. Find a ISP provider that will meet your needs
  7. Decide if you want a Domain name or just a raw web page.
  8. Pay the money to get your web page up on the internet.
  9. Put a Counter on your home page.
  10. Add META TAGS to your web site.
  11. Register you web URL with the search engines
  12. Possible Free Web Sites.

 

What to say: With so many other people what can we add to the mix? Each of us has a unique view of life. Each of us has a way of approaching life that is different from all other people. Your very way may be what others need in their search for their own truth. You may want to do a "Tea Ceremony", Tai Chi, Modern Physics, poetry, some new form of meditation or music. Don't let my words limit you. Each of us has something to offer others. It is really just a question of wanting to put out enough effort. The information contained here will hopefully minimize the effort needed by presenting you with a cut at the technology. In many ways the technology is the easy part. Presenting yourself - now that is more of a challenge.

Do you need a web site? Many services needed by the Enligtenment Intensive community are free. If you just need to tell people about your upcoming Enlightenment Intensives www.sandoth.com will do that free for you. If you want to put up a bio-sheet www.dyad.org will do that for free. On the other hand, you will need to submit requests, and it will take time to make it happen. A personal web site would be quicker. If you have a new or different view of personal growth than the ones you find already on the web, then a personal web site might be the way to go.

Find a computer. If you are new to computers, and have money, buy a named brand PC from a local store that has been in business for a few years. Don't buy the cheapest and don't buy the most expensive. If you don't have much money - look for a used computer. Do not buy a computer with less than 32 meg of ram, or more than 5 years old. Spending good money on junk is not a way to save money. The best way to find a good computer cheap is to go to the public library and use the one with public access. Your time will be limited but you can do many things without spending any money.

A good place to find a good deal on a new or refurbished computer is in the basement of http://www.ubid.com/ this is an auction so watch it for a few days before you bid. I got a good deal, a fully loaded new NT system with everything I wanted for $367. (June 99 I got 350 Mhz K6-II with 32 meg ram, 6.4 Gig hard drive, 44x CDROM, video accelerator (8 meg ram) for fast graphics, and Yamaha sound board. The video monitor I had to get somewhere else.)

Find a dial up service to get to internet

Need a free Internet email account? Try Hotmail, Juno, Rocketmail, or Yahoo.com. You can get your mail at the library and do it all for free if you wish. That is how my wife and I kept in contact with our friends on our honeymoon and we didn't have to carry the laptop computer.

For a home connection - the fastest service is from the cable TV companies - check with them first. Many communities don't yet have fully modern cable TV so you will have to use your telephone system. There are many dial up internet providers - I use MCI and their $5 per month limited service. Check with your friends and see what they use. Be sure you get one that supports your modem speed. Some providers go at slow speeds which might defeat the expensive fast modem in your computer. No point in paying for a fast modem and then making it slow. Make sure you will not be paying long distance charges just to reach your dial up service or you will be shocked when you get your next phone bill.

For more information try http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/www/leasing.html

Build a web page on your computers hard disk

The whole internet is nothing more than a bunch of HTML documents connected by computer protocol procedures. You can build a web page on your hard disk and look at it with your web browser. When it looks good, you simply transfer it to the web location using ftp protocol. We will cover that later, but for now let us focus on making your web page located only on your local hard disk.

There are many ways to create HTML documents. I use Microsoft Word 97. It has an option under "File" called "save as HTML" which works just fine. That is how all of what appears on www.dyad.org was created. My point is that all the popular word processors are becoming web compatible and they have the nice feature of checking you words for mis-spellings. Since there are many ways - the first one you learn might just meet all your needs. If you have a friend that can answer questions it might be wise to use the system they use.

For more information see the helpful web site http://www.aphids.com/susan/hmpg/

Find a ISP provider that will meet your needs. There are two types of Internet Service Providers - real connections and virtual connections.

The real connections have a local phone number you dial up with your modem interface. They also provide a 1-800 number but they bill you for its use. The 1-800 number is when you travel outside of your local phone district.

Virtual connections are ISP providers who give you a web site, but you have to use some other dial up service to get there. That is what I use for www.dyad.org I use MCI with their $5 monthly dial up service, and I use http://www.webaxxs.net to get me a web site for $15.95 per month. Meaning that sometimes I change my e-mail address, but never my web site. I moved from Huntsville to Albertville some 60 miles away. MCI did not have a local number from Albertville, so I had to change my e-mail address.

For more information try http://www.hypernews.org/HyperNews/get/www/leasing.html

Decide if you want a Domain name or just a raw web page.

You can get a cheap web page if you are willing to type a long name in. If you want something short like www.dyad.org you will have more trouble. It will cost you at least $70 for two years of coverage. You must register your "domain name" with Internic. They are the ones who provide internet domain names. You can learn more about Internic at: http://www.internic.net/

If you are willing to use www.dyad.org/yourname you can hyperlink that to some very long name that nobody has to know. You can even change the long name from time to time and no one will know. I have room for 300 megabytes on my web site - and a home page only takes 10 k or so - so that I have room for 30,000 people before I need more space. That way you don't need to pay Internic.net anything. We wish to serve people who provide Enlightenment Intensives. It helps the whole planet.

Pay the money to get your web page up on the internet.

I found the easiest way was to just use my credit card. My monthly costs of $15.95 show up on my VISA card each month. It is so painless that I almost forget about it. If you pay by check it takes more time to process and validate the check and that translates into delay. I don't like delay.

Next you will need to learn how to FTP your web page to your web service provider (ISP provider) check here for info http://axxs.net/part3.html for both the PC and Mac. Another way is to use Microsoft's frontpage http://axxs.net/part7.html#frontpage

Put a Counter on your home page.

Each web provider has a recommended way to add a counter to your main web page. That is because the "hit" counter requires their computer to keep track of the number of times people have visited your web site. That in turn depends on if they have a NT server or a LINUX server. Some web providers don't even offer counters, but most do. Ask before you spend your money.

Add META TAGS to your web site.

Meta Tags are symbols that are placed in your HTML code (your web source code) that directly communicate with search engines. They let search engines like www.yahoo.com know what key words you want the search engines to match on. In other words people at www.yahoo.com may type in "enlightenment+dyad" as a search request. Your Meta Tags located in your source code can tell yahoo.com to come to your web site. If your Meta Tags have the two key words "enlightenment" and "dyad" and you have registered your web page with Yahoo.com then it can find you and tell the user about your site.

You can find out about Meta Tags at:

http://searchenginewatch.internet.com/webmasters/meta.html

You can check your web site for accurate use of HTML code by going to http://www.websitegarage.com/wsg/scripts/states/start.cgi?origin=register&page=/index.html

I found many errors in dyad.org by using this "Garage" site.

Also you might check at http://www.scrubtheweb.com/abs/meta-check.html

Register you web URL with the search engines

Just because you have a Internet presents that you can reach does not mean that others can find it. Other people use search engines to find what they need. The search engines use key words, found in META TAG statements on web sites to lead people to what they are searching for. If you don't use META TAGS people will have to find your web site from another web site or because you told them. Of course if you tell www.sandoth.com or www.dyad.org we will put in links to your web site. But who finds us? We may use the wrong keywords. You may know a better way. More people may find your web site and then link to ours than the other way around. What do people search for? What can we give them? The more people who answer this question the better coverage we will have. So when you have your web site up, with META TAGS now you just need to register it with the 400 or so search engines.

To register your site for free, just go down each of these links and register by hand your web site. The easy way to do this is to use the copy and paste keys. On the first link, use your copy key in your browser to save the URL address (what you must type in to get to your web site in the form http://www.????????) Then when you go to the next link on this page - you can paste in the same line you typed the first time. This will save you time and minimize any mis-typing.

InfoSeek:
http://www.infoseek.com/AddUrl?pg=DCaddurl.html
or e-mail your complete URL (including the http:// prefix) to: www-request@infoseek.com and cool@infoseek.com

Excite: http://www.excite.com/Info/add_url.html

Magellan:http://www.mckinley.com/magellan/Info/addsite.html

Alta Vista:http://altavista.digital.com/av/content/addurl.htm
Lycos Inc. at:http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html

Info-hiway at: http://www.infohiway.com/isn/addurl.html

Webcrawler at:http://webcrawler.com/WebCrawler/Help/GetListed/GetListed.html

Yahoo at:http://add.yahoo.com/fast/add?

Hotbot at:http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.html

Northern light at: http://www.northernlight.com/docs/register.htm

Blackwidow at: http://www.penetang.com/blackwidow/add.htm

PlanetSearch at: http://www.planetsearch.com/?a=19

What-u-Seek at: http://www.whatuseek.com/addurl.htm

Super Snooper http://snooper.com/AddURL.htm

ZenSearch at: http://www.zensearch.com/AddURL.html

Scrub the Web at: http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html

Nerd World at: http://www.nerdworld.com/cgi-bin/nwadd.cgi

Goto at: http://wwwo.goto.com/about/add.html

Galaxy at: http://galaxy.tradewave.com/cgi-bin/annotate?/galaxy

Ask Jeeves at: http://www.askjeeves.com/Docs/HelpFrame.html#URL

World Wide Web Worm at:http://thphys.irb.hr/worm.html

Linkstar at: http://www.linkstar.com/linkstar/bin/doform?form=ecard

 

Possibly Free Web sites:

First don't forget my offer. My web site provider offers me 300 megabytes. I use about 10 megabytes because I store all my source code backups - which take up about 8 megabytes more then you see. You can start out here and then move on later.

First see the list at http://members.tripod.com/~jpsp1/sites.html

Then a smaller list:

Tripod's Homepage Builder
With your free membership, you receive 11MB of disk space. A special pop-up menu will appear when people view your pages. You can increase your available disk space for a monthly fee.

Angelfire Communications
This company offers 5 MB of disk space, with few limitations. If you keep your disk space under 200K, you can avoid any advertising.

Hypermart
Although meant primarily for businesses, this one has some nice features. You get 10 MB of space, the ability to use CGI scripts and FrontPage extensions, very inexpensive domain name registration, and other really nice features. You will have to display their banner ad on all pages. For a small monthly fee, you can avoid advertising, but even with the fee, it's cheaper than most ISPs.

FortuneCity

10 MB of free web space. Each page will have advertising automatically inserted on it. This program is similar to GeoCities Communities, except I don't see one speficially for religion. Family is probably the best area as of June 1998. The guidelines on this site are stricter than on some others.

GeoCities Homesteading on the World Wide Web
http://www.geocities.com/join/freehp.html
You get up to 3MB of disk space, and you can either use ftp to upload pages you've created yourself, or you can use their web page tools to get you started. Other options are available for fairly low fees, including extra disk space and a simpler URL address such as: http://www.geocities.com/~yourname/
 
Houses of Worship
http://www.hows.net/how/vision/
Houses of Worship provides customized and automated World Wide Web pages for every church in North America. They actually have blank web sites set up for every single church. This is a free service, designed to help churches communicate better with their congregations -- and with each other. Information on a church's pages can be updated by anyone authorized by the church. With many different topics available, each church may have many different editors. All the pages look pretty much exactly the same (layout and color-wise), but this may be a good option for some congregations. It's really not meant to serve as full-service "hosting" - they like to think of themselves as "the on-line equivalent of a weekly church bulletin."

If there are other free services - please let me know of them. e-mail me at Bill Savoie.

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