I have a web site!

[tigertoy]

From the about-freakin'-time dept.:

On Monday, with the assistance of my gaming buddy Chad, I got myself a domain, and set up hosting for a simple web site.  Chad's company, Surface 51, mainly does graphic design, but they also sell web hosting services.  (The Surface51 site is all flash, actively dialup-hostile, but it does look slick.)  So he could set me up with a site for what I think is a reasonable price, with the added benefit that I have someone I know I can ask for help when I get lost.

Feel free to browse over to www.tigertoy.net (tigertoy.com is taken, though there isn't actually a site connected to it) if you want to see how I'm coming.  Nothing there now but a cute picture, but I did prove that I can put a file with my HTML on the server, which is an important starting point.

I'll be trying to spend a few hours working on the site in the next few days.  I'm open to constructive suggestions for very simple things I can do with the site, but please bear in mind that I know a little bit of HTML and basically nothing about any other web technology.  I am inclined to write my own HTML, as a learning experience, but I'll listen to recommendations of free HTML editing software.  I'd also be interested if you can recommend web sites that can teach me what I need to know efficiently, which is to say not a spoon feeding tutorial aimed at a 7 year old intellect, but also not something that blithely assumes I already know all this stuff.  A tutorial for smart people would be great; references that are clearly written and well hyperlinked are not bad.  Finally, Chad suggests that I find an FTP client that supports SFTP; if you can recommend a free one, that'd be cool.  I got the two files I uploaded to produce the placeholder site through the web interface for managing the site, but that's really klunky.

Comments

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

"Arachnophilia" is a pretty decent HTML editor, that lets you work from the code-side and watch the results-side in a stacked pair of windows.

[alymid.livejournal.com]

I would also recommend First page 2000 - its free and works very well
http://www.evrsoft.com it also allows you to code in one window and watch it form up in a parallel window - this is a priceless tool when learning how to code html.

http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/
This is the first place I started learning HTML. It is a little spoonfed, but it does it well. Each lesson is interactive allowing you to test what they are teaching and try it out right away.

I also recommend the Visual Quickstart Guide on HTML by Elizabeth Castro.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321392280/qid=1121261372/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/103-9463712-6296661?v=glance&s=books
I think it is worthwhile noting that in a field where most books go in and out of print in a year or so, this one is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

She also has a newer one that includes XHTML and CSS, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0321130073/qid=1121261445/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-9463712-6296661?v=glance&s=books

I don't know if it has SFTP but I use ACEFTP on the recomendation of autographedcat and have had good sucess with it, I use it for both home and work.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

There is actually (sigh....) more than one secure FTP protocol commonly/sometimes called "SFTP".... This despite the fact that there is no need for more than one protocol in the first place. For a unix client, I recommend lftp, which handles most of your FTP-like needs. For MS Windows or OS X: beats me.

W3.org is probably not a great place to learn how to write HTML, but I couldn't get by without the Character Entity References page there.

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm planning on selling stuff (or at least hoping to), and in any case, I'm not an organization. Of course, I'm not net infrastructure either, but my feeling is that .net has more completely lost its meaning than .org.