The beauty of the Internet lies in the freedom it gives to individuals to publish to other individuals. In the eighteenth century the personal firearm revolutionized politics and encouraged the formation of the American republic. The computer is the rifle of the information age, and the personal computer will do the same thing to the clusters of informational power that the rifle did to clusters of political power. The twentieth century media giant will go the way of the eighteenth century tyrant.
Or, as Jello Biafra said, “Don’t hate the media. Become the media.”
There are numerous ways for you to publish to the net, and you’ll need to talk to your Internet provider about your options. Here, I’m going to talk about just two: web pages and mailing lists.
If you have something you want the world to know, you can publish it from your Unix account. All you really need is something to put there. Talk to your ISP about how to do this, but usually you get web space as part of your Internet service package. In other words, if you’re not using it, you’re wasting money!
You normally write web pages with a special web editor, such as Netscape Communicator’s Composer. You can also write them by hand, though I wouldn’t recommend it. See my own Basic HTML here on Negative Space. Your main page has to be called “index.html”, and the rest of them can have any filename ending in “.html”.
Web pages are written using something called “HTML code”. It’s called code because it was created by programmers, and they call everything that they write “code”, probably because normal people can’t read it. HTML code, however, is just normal text with HyperText Markup Language “directives” sprinkled throughout it. For example, if you want to emphasize a word, you surround it with the HTML “emphasis” directive:
<em>wow!</em>
appears as
wow!
There are also directives for headlines, citations, strong text and lots of directives no one understands, such as blinking text.
If you want to link a word to another web page, you surround it with the “link” directive, which is just a URL:
<a href="http://www.hoboes.com/html/NetLife/">Neon Alley</a>
appears as
Neon Alley
and if the reader selects those words, they are transported to the Neon Alley on Negative Space. You don’t have to worry about this if you’re using a web editor to create your web pages, however. The web editor will do the ‘code’ for you, and all you have to concentrate on is the content . If you want to pay for one, the two best web page editors are currently Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver.
If you want to see how someone else’s web page is “coded”, most web browsers allow you to “view” the “source” of any web page you’re looking at.
If you and some of your new-found net friends around the world want to talk about something, but you haven’t found a place already on the net to use, you can create your own mailing list. Your mailing list will be accessible to the entire Internet.
You can usually sign up with your Internet provider to get your own mailing list, for mere dollars a month. You can have a free-form mailing list, or you can moderate it.
If you decide to moderate your own mailing list, you must be prepared for the responsibilities! It is up to you to handle problems among list members, problems that list members and potential list members have using the mailing list, and any bounced mail that occurs when some list members disappear, or their computers go down temporarily.
Make sure there isn’t already a mailing list devoted to your topic.
If you can’t afford to pay for a mailing list, or your provider doesn’t provide that service, and you have a Macintosh, I recommend looking at Leuca Software’s Macjordomo.
Look at Negative Space Software Recommendations for more links to software that makes it easy to serve the net!
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