Saving as....

Open notepad or word pad and type the above onto the screen. Save the file to your desktop as filename.htm. You can call it whatever you want. I named mine personal.htm.

Close notepad (or wordpad). You should have an icon on your desktop titled filename.htm or whatever you named it. If you use Explorer it will be a blue lowercase e. Double click on the icon. It should open the page shown above.

This is the bare basics of creating a web page using html.

The first line:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN" >

defines the doctype declaration. Actually, I am way behind in versions, so if one were to create a web page, you should go here for a list of current DTD (document type definition) to use.

The next line is HTML surrounded by the left and right carat symbols. This is the opening tag for Hyper Text Markup Language. (Basic web language).

The < > symbols form an opening statement. So if you open a statement, you must close it at some point and time. Closing the HTML tag looks like this: < /HTML >

The simple page above consists of the DTD, the HTML, Title, Head and body. I forgot to close the Center tag, so anything I add to the page would be centered.

What I am getting at here is you can view any web page on the Web. While viewing, take your mouse and click the right mouse button. This will bring up a pop-up menu. Using your left mouse button choose "View Source" . Depending on your browser you may have a different name for this feature. Firefox titles it "View Page Source" and Explorer calls it "View Source."

This will bring the source code up in a text formatted window. Save the file to your desktop. It should already have the extension of .htm or .html behind it. Close the text page and minimize your browser and any other programs you have open until you see your desktop.

Select the icon of the file you just saved by clicking on it once with your left mouse button. With the cursor still on the icon, click your right mouse button. This should bring up a pop up menu. Choose "Open with..." if you have that feature and open the file with word pad. (Notepad works, but word pad will filter out some very strange symbols that Notepad won't.).

Now, you can see the source code that folks use to write their web pages.

Sigh. Most use fancy canned packages like Dreamweaver or Frontpage. This is okay, but I wanted to learn the nuts and bolts. I wanted to create a web page from scratch. I have a long way to go and mine is not very fancy, but it is the way I like to do things.

The next time you are in your blog's dashboard area, cruise on over to the template section. Beginning with the < !DOCTYPE line and ending with the < /html >, select all of the text in between with your mouse and save this to a text file. Once the text is selected and high lighted, click Edit Save. Open notepad or word pad and click Edit, Paste. The template should appear on the text document. Choose Save as... and type filename.txt or whatever you want to call it. Template.txt. This way if you have any problems with your blog, you can go back and compare it to what you last saved it as to find out what happened.

And, once it is saved to your desktop or the folder of your choice, you can save another copy and name it template.htm. This should appear as the lower case blue e on your desktop (if you use Explorer). Double click it and you should see the bare bones of your blog's homepage.

Ah, I hope I didn't bore you too much with this post. I think I will take it and section it off into steps and post it on my homepage for basic html beginners. I don't know anybody that wants to learn html anymore, but I did. I don't know a lot about it, but I taught myself enough to start my own web page. I wanted to go farther with it, but alas - time.