About the website for Carlyle Gardens Computer Club.
The website is an experiment. There is no suggestion that the club must have a website. It is just that, these days, hosting a website is pretty cheap. So, why not have one?
There is no specific plan about the content, except that it mainly contain material that may be of interest to the people who are members of the Carlyle Gardens Computer Club. This may include current club news. The history of the club. Material about active members of the club. Hints and tips about using computers. Tutorial articles. Background information. Reviews of computing devices and associated gadgets.
Below you can find something about the website contents. Towards the end of the page is a little bit about how to build a website.
A website is assembled like a tree. The base is called the root. The main web page articles about the club are in this area. For example, the home page gives a bit of a guide to the contents. There is a list of the present and past committees, by year. Another is an alphabetical list of past committee members, to which I would like to add photographs. I have a help wanted page, seeking material and help for the website. For example, I need some artistic people right now. There is a privacy page, where a privacy policy will eventually go.
One slightly unusual file is just a readme text file, containing questions and answers about the website. This is not a web page, but it does show that not every page on a website needs to be written as a web page. You can use just plain text, if you want, or if you have not yet learnt how to produce a web page.
There are a number of normally not visible files that are used for internal operation of the website. A cascading style sheet controls what the entire web site looks like. The appearance of every page can be changed by altering this single file. The Favicon is an image that appears in your address bar when you view the web site. We need an artist to help design a better favicon. The robots.txt file tells search engine web crawlers what they should not index. In our case, no restrictions for the moment.
Finally, there are the branches, or folders or directories, each containing more files. In the list view of the website, folders end with a slash/ We can have as many folders as we like. At the moment we have experiments, future, gadgets, images, infonite, internet, and website (where this web page resides).
A place for experimental pages, and rough drafts of pages.
Empty at the moment.
I like gadgets, so I write about them. There is a list of Kickstarter funded gadgets here. I encourage reviews of gadgets you have.
A place to hold photos and graphics for the root web pages. Putting images in a separate folder helps reduce clutter. There will probably eventually be an image folder in every other folder. It is a pretty standard way to do websites.
A folder specifically for details of Infonites. There are a fair number of pages already, with more to come. I hope those who present Infonites will eventually make their notes available for this section of the website.
A folder for articles about how the internet works. Mostly has rough text drafts at the moment, but there are a few web pages there.
A folder about our website, and about how websites work. I hope to also provide material on how to write web pages.
I buy space, renewed annually, on a web host called Dreamhost. I find this the most convenient way to provide websites. I like Dreamhost because they offer unlimited space, for an unlimited number of websites. They are a very geek friendly web host. Their prices are also reasonably good. I have a number of my other websites hosted on Dreamhost. I do not need to pay extra money for hosting additional websites. However I do have to pay annually for each additional domain name I want to own.
I own the domain name carlylegardenscomputerclub.com, for the moment. I bought it via Dreamhost. Although you can buy names via any Domain Name registrar, it was convenient for me to use Dreamhost. Domain names in .com typically cost between US$10 and US$20 a year. Anyone can buy any name that is not already taken. All the good short names were sold long ago.
After a web page is written on your computer, you transfer it to your web host. I usually use File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to do this. There are a number of file transfer programs available, both free and commercial. Some are easier to use than others. There are also issues with file permissions, so some knowledge may be needed.
All Apple Macintosh computers have a free command line ftp program available in their Terminal. These tend to be a bit of a pain to use, unless you write a script to do all the hard work for you automatically. I really should get around to writing a script.
I used to use the open source CyberDuck, but it seems to use Java, which I am not willing to install. I think I am using YummyFTP at the moment.
I write these web pages with a text editor. A web page is simply text, with markup tags enclosed in angle brackets. Well, to be more specific, text in UTF8 (so you can include foreign languages). Any text editor that handles UTF8 is suitable. If a text editor does not specifically mention it handles UTF8, do not use it. Trying to use any word processor, such as Microsoft Word, guarantees problems.
Why not use one of the many website production tools? The high end ones like Adobe Dreamweaver cost a lot of money. However the main reasons are I am used to text editors, and I have never seen a website tool that actually produces valid HTML.
An unofficial social Computer Club whose members live happily in Carlyle Gardens Retirement Resort Townsville.