CREDITS
(or: How I Built This Website)

I found the best place to learn about authoring web pages was on the web itself. I found a document entitled "NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML." Using just this document, I was able to layout my first rudimentary pages. I created a main page and some simple links. I used tables to format text into specific areas (such as our officer's listings). I thought about what I might want to know about a motorcycle club if I looked it up on the web and included that information on my pages; a brief history of the club, our ByLaws, and links to external sites I thought other motorcyclists might find interesting.

At about this same time my good friend Dave Feuer was building his own website so I started exchanging ideas with him. I also discovered how woefully inadequate Compuserve was as a web server. Instead of using standard FTP to update the pages they force you to use a 16-bit Windows application which uses a proprietary protocol to update the site. This meant only DOS-based 8.3 file names, which also meant that I couldn't use Java on my pages. Compuserve also doesn't allow CGI scripts. It was time to shop around for a new provider.

Dave introduced me to Digihost (who at the time was providing him with his web space; Dave now has gone into business for himself where he provides web space to others, check out his service at Connetrix). Once on Digihost I was able to use OS/2 Warp's own FTP client to update my files, which meant I could use real long file names. Plus, Digihost uses UNIX as their web server so the performance is significantly faster than the miserable WindowsNT platform Compuserve was using. An additional bonus was that we got our own domain name which was much easier to remember than the long, drawn-out URL we had while under Compuserve.

I liked the idea of having a portion of the web page remain fixed while the rest was scrollable. I could leave navigation functions in a fixed frame so any visitor could easily navigate from page to page without scrolling to the top or the bottom of a page to find these functions. I picked up a book, Creating and Enhancing Netscape Web Pages (Bestseller Edition) by Andy Shafran (ISBN: 0-7897-0876-0), for information on how to create frames and navigate amongst them. I highly recommend this book!

After converting my pages to frames, I learned that not all of our members used frame-enabled browsers. I learned a valuable lesson: A web page is only as valuable as the number of people who can access it. To exclude anyone from my pages because they aren't using the latest and greatest browser is folly. If only a percentage (even a large one) of the population can read your pages, that means you've excluded a potential group that would've liked to have seen your pages, but can't. I redid the pages so that ALL of the information on them is available to ANY browser on ANY platform. Some bells and whistles may be missing from earlier browsers, but all of the important content is available. I installed copies of Sun's HotJava browser, Opera Software's Opera, IBM's WebExplorer, Netscape's Navigator and the text-based Lynx browser on my system. As long as I could access all of my pages intelligibly with these browsers, I figure anyone could.

I did want to add SOME bells and whistles, but remembering my earlier lesson, I didn't want to make the bells and whistles NECESSARY parts of the page, just a little something to enhance the web experience for my visitors. The easiest thing to do was dress up the pages a little with JavaScript. JavaScript is a language built into the web browser itself that allows web authors to create some pretty neat special effects on their pages. Most (but not all) modern browsers support JavaScript. On my pages I use JavaScript to automatically track the last date a page was updated, the navigation buttons on the bottom of our pages, and to give a little additional information on some of our links.

Like HTML itself, the best reference I found for JavaScript was on the web itself. I found Netscape's JavaScript Authoring Reference particularly useful. If you're like me you might find working examples of JavaScript more useful than just reading about them. If that's so, you can find a wealth of JavaScript samples at JavaScript World.

Another good way of dressing up your web pages is with CGI scripts. Unlike JavaScript, CGI scripts will work with ALL browsers. That's because CGI scripts work at the server side, not on the client (web browser) side like JavaScript. Most (if not all) UNIX-based web servers work with CGI scripts written in Perl. On our pages, the Guestbook and visitor counters are CGI scripts. CGI scripts are a little harder to implement than JavaScript as you actually have to upload the scripts to your server and implement them from there. Check with your web provider to see if they even support CGI Scripts. For an excellent source of pre-written CGI scripts (written in Perl) check out Matt's Script Archive (that's where I got our Guestbook Script).

Of course the best way to really light up your site would be with Sun's Java language. Java is a programming language based on C++ developed for network applications. It is designed to run on any operating system. You don't even have to know programming to implement Java on your web pages. There are tons of Java applets available free for the taking from their authors. The news scroller applet on our logo page came from JavaShareware.com. Go check it out and see if there's anything there you like!

Another important aspect of a web document are the graphics. Granted a browser like Lynx forgoes the graphics and works with pure text, but graphics are what make web pages attractive to the rest of us. Since I use OS/2 Warp 4 as my web development package my choices in graphics applications may be more limited than most. Fortunately, my limited number of choices are also all QUALITY applications. For scanning images I use CompArt's ImpOS/2 2.1 software. For image resizing, conversion and touching up, I like PMView. One of the most powerful image editing programs is available for nearly all platforms, and is absolutely free. Check out the GNU Image Manipulation Program (aka GIMP) and see if it serves your needs too.

A good use for a graphics image would be as an Image Map; click on an item in a picture to link to something else. There are two kinds of image maps: client-side and server-side. I use a client-side image map on my "About Us" page. A client-side image map requires that you use a browser that supports one. If you use a client-side image map, don't forget to take into account those browsers that don't support them. There is a wonderful, freeware utility available on the web for creating client-side image maps called (oddly enough) the Client-Side Image Map Editor. It is written in 100% Pure Java and should run on any platform.

HTML is all well and good, but sometimes you need something more structured, something that looks the same no matter how you look at it. With HTML (as I've discovered), what the pages look like depend on how all the different browsers out there render pages. We wanted a way to electronically distribute our newsletters and other documents, and HTML wasn't up to the task. Instead, we decided on Portable Document Format files. PDF (also called "Acrobat files") is a format invented by the Adobe Corporation for paperless documents. It has built-in compression, and even supports encryption to protect sensitive files (such as our newsletters which occasionally contain personal addresses and phone numbers). I had only one problem with Acrobat; although Adobe Corporation makes a Reader freely available for nearly all computing platforms (including my own), the software used to create PDF files was expensive, and not available for OS/2 Warp.

Enter Aladdin Ghostscript. Like GIMP, Ghostscript is an open-source program freely available on the web for nearly every computing platform on the planet. Although not the most user-friendly software available, Ghostscript is very good at creating PDF files; nearly every PDF file at the Nassau Wings website was created with Ghostscript. The only exception is the newsletter, which is encrypted. Due to U.S. Export laws regarding encryption, Aladdin Ghostscript does not include the capability of encrypting files. For that we use Adobe Acrobat running under one of its supported platforms.

Okay, so I've talked about servers, graphics, Java, JavaScript, CGI Scripts and PDF files. What I didn't talk about was how I created the HTML files themselves. Although there are plenty of products out there that are supposed to make creating web pages easy, I've found nothing easier than a plain old text editor. OS/2 Warp 4 comes with three text editors, but I found the Enhanced Programmer's Editor (EPM) to be the best all around editor for working with HTML. That may change, as IBM and Netscape FINALLY released Netscape Communicator for OS/2 Warp 4.  Communicator includes an HTML editor called "Composer" which is a pretty nice WYSIWYG web page editor.  This page was created with Netscape Composer and touched up with EPM.