What is with Livejournal? I mean, jeez do people have that much trouble keeping up their journal on a website? I mean, who would pay to have their journal displayed as though it were just strung together day after day, in a hard to read font, surrounded in advertising?
Lots, apparently.
Frankly if you take my advice, make a file in your favorite text editor, call it 'journal.html'. Begin it like this:
---
<html>
<head>
<title>My Journal</title>
</head>
<body>
<dl>
---
Basically that sets up a title, and the header, starts the body and a definition list. Definition lists are great for associating two types of data, such as perhaps a date and a journal entry? So then you type this:
---
<dt>7.05.2003
<dd>
What is with Livejournal? I mean, jeez do people [rest snipped to
avoid recursion.]
<!-- Remember this spot -->
---
To close it off, type this:
---
</dl>
</body>
</html>
---
Then, you register an account with feepjournal.com, send $2/month for their
excellent gold membership features, invite your friends to--oh wait, NO. You
don't do any of this. You are done. Your journal has 1 entry. You
want to add the next day? Remember that place that said <!-- remember this spot -->? Add your next entry right there. It should look something like this:
---
<dt>7.06.3015
<dd>
Corflugfl! Zorg and I went to Venus today to examine the frobnitz complexrafil [rest snipped to avoid paradox.]
---
Okay, now your journal has two entries. (Why aren't you journaling more often?) At this point you might have two questions. "How do I get my friends to see it?" and "How do I make it look pretty?"
1) How do I get my friends to see it?
Walk them over to your computer screen. ;) Seriously, you need to get this html page up on a web server. You can try to run a server yourself, a very daunting task that can be expensive if you don't want to give out numeric homepages. Plus unless you're good, you might be exposing your computer to hackers. The plus side is you get absolute control of everything that happens to your webpage. You want CGI? Sure! SSL includes? No problem! You can give yourself a hard time about .htaccess files, but no matter how hard you argue, you're going to have to win the argument.
Another option is to use someone else's server. Do you know any computer geeks? Does anyone you know know any computer geeks? Of those who enjoy using computers at their most intimate and binary level, do any of them run web servers you could borrow some space on? How about on IRC, newsgroups, other chat rooms, online dungeons, conventions? (Anthrocon once offered free email forwarding since they need the domain for their convention anyway.)
Even if you don't know anyone, there are web servers that accept different specific types of content. I am on transform.to, a very wonderful and nice
place that hosts transformation interest web pages. (If you don't know I'm interested in transformation yet, how did you get all the way down here? o.o) There are others too, there are anime servers, there are animal lover servers, there are motorcycle fan servers, artist/scribbler servers. A web server is just a computer running a program that displays web pages, and if you can find something (preferably free) that will allow you to upload an html file, you have got yourself a webpage.
Suppose you have a website at
http://fornby.whoomba.pork/~belldanny/. To get your page up there, you could name the journal file 'index.html' or make an index.html file like this:
---
<html><head><title>My Index</title></head>
<body>
Hi this is my page. Here are some links. Omg I am so fly, u r genuis tassi. If you'd like to hear what I have to say try my <a href="journal.html">journal</a>
</body></html>
---
Don't ask me why they call "links" by the name "a". (It stands for anchor, okay?) Now you have made these two files, index.html and your journal which you should call 'journal.html' by my example index. Ok, now hopefully fornby.whoomba.pork is a POSIX machine with at least ftp access. (Actually, ssh access is safer if they trust you as a user, but most webmins are not going to do that, nothing personal.)
(There's a lot of leeway with that POSIX thing. All you really need from them is a way to transfer the files, so ftp (File Transfer Protocol) just makes sense, no? There are other ways, find out about them elsewhere.)
Move both files, index and journal, into a convenient directory on your computer, you can make a 'website' directory like I did if you want. If you're in windows, the only way to succeed is through laborious and frustrating typing. Like this:
---
(Start Menu -> Run -> type 'cmd', that don't work? Repeat and type 'command.com')
(A black box will appear, with a cursor. Type where it is bold from here on.)
$ cd q:\my\home\dir\website
$ ftp
ftp> open fornby.whoomba.pork
Fornby FTP server
v.2.0 arg X b q so fly
We love pork.
login:belldanny
password:
Password ok.
ftp> ls
0 files.
ftp> put index.html
Putting index.html dooo dooo...
[2%] done
[25%] done
[76%] done
ftp> put journal.html
[30%] done
[85%] done
ftp> exit
221 Goodbye.
$ exit; quit; whatever
(The black box.... closes.)
---
Now... go to your web browser... any browser... oh gaea you're going to use Internet Explorer aren't you. Nothing wrong with that... hunting squirrels with an elephant gun...
Anyway, type the URL (or "Location")
http://fornby.whoomba.pork/~belldanny/
Did it work? Press enter. Did it work? No? Too bad, look elsewhere for help. Useful search engine terms may be 'ftp' 'web servers' 'html help' 'POSIX operating systems' 'ssl'...
If it worked, you should see some amazingly intelligent text, some of which is a little blue link. Click on the link, and your journal should be displayed and OH MY GOD IT'S HIDEOUS!
Calm down. No reason to get all upset. You've got a long way to go. The standards commission for HTML finally did something sane in my opinion, and separated specifications for how the page looks from specifications for what the page means. I gave you what the page means. You can use CSS style sheets to change how the page looks. For a great site for learning both HTML and CSS, and most certainly not Javascript or *shudder* VBScript or SHUDDDER ActiveX.
Go there. Learn. Find peace, whatever. If you like that site enough, consider putting 'HTML goddess' on your resume. That site taught me everything I ever wanted to know about HTML. Everything I didn't want to know about, like Javascript browser specificity, I learned in other random places constantly proving that search engines are good.
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