times in 1999 and
times in 1998.
First, you should be a regular (or at least occasional) participant in the Club Seattle chat channel. That channel is meant for people from Seattle and surrounding areas, people interested in Seattle, or anyone with friends who frequent the channel. In other words, you're welcome, as long as you're nice.
Second, you need to ask the webmaster to add you to the list, by e-mailing clubseattle@oocities.com. Don't be surprised if answers come back from a different address, because that address just goes to the webmaster, who has a different address. That address makes it easier to change who answers webmaster mail, in the event that we change webmasters.
In the list itself, the main requirement is that the listing be short, and pretty much in the same style as what other people have in their listings. If you request a listing, but don't tell the webmaster what to say, you're likely to get something dumb in your listing, like "what can we say?", like a few people have in their listings.
If a few words on the main list aren't enough for you, you can have an additional page, linked to your name in the main list. That can be your own page, or a page that's part of the Club Seattle site itself.
Getting a page of your own is just like getting on the list. Ask the webmaster in e-mail.
There are only a few restrictions on what you can have on a Club Seattle page. First, the content must follow the rules of the web site provider. (The web site provider is currently Geocities.) Second, you also need to follow the webmaster's content restrictions, which mostly amount to guessing what the web site provider will allow. Finally, the content has to be easy for the webmaster to put on a page.
The webmaster knows a few tricks for making cool-looking web pages. But some of them are quite a lot of work for a webmaster to create, so the webmaster won't do them just for fun. Some things that look cool are actually fairly easy, and some things that look easy are actually not so easy, so it's hard to say what's easy enough. Go ahead and ask.
If you want something that looks pretty much like something that's already on the page, that's probably just fine. If you want something more complicated, you probably won't get it, unless you figure out how to to it yourself, create it yourself, and send it to the webmaster mostly finished. If you have something in mind that you don't see on a page that's there now, just ask the webmaster. If it turns out to be easy, you get to be the first one to do a page that way. If it isn't easy, you can ask for something else.
A few paragraphs of plain text, or a picture or two are easy. If that's all you want, just send e-mail telling what you want to say, in a form as close as you can make to how you want it to look.
That's actually a two part question. The first part is how you get a web-usable picture in the first place. The second part is how you get the picture onto a web page.
To get a picture into a web-usable form, you first need a picture. One way is to draw it with a computer art program. If you make a picture that way, it is pretty close to usable on a web page from the beginning. All you need to do is convert it to GIF format, which compresses computer-drawn pictures well. If you don't know how to do that, the webmaster can do it for you, but then you have to wait for the webmaster to get around to it. Please do that conversion yourself if you know how.
If you don't want to use a drawing, you can also use a photograph. Presumably you already know how to make them. To make a photograph usable on a web page, it must be scanned. The scanned picture should be in JPEG format, which compresses scanned pictures very well.
You can get pictures scanned at some libraries, for free. You can also take them to Kinko's (or lots of similar businesses) where you can either do it yourself (for a price) or have one of their people do it for you (for a higher price). For exremely high quality, you can get photographs put on a Kodak Photo-CD, by taking it to a camera shop that can send it in for you. (The first picture on a Photo-CD is fairly expensive, but after the first one additional ones are fairly inexpensive.) You can also get your own scanner, and do the job yourself.
It's very good to know how to scan things yourself. If you do it at a library, have someone teach you how, so you're not always stuck asking someone else do it for you. If you do it at Kinko's (or a similar place), pay them to show you how to work the self-serve machine, so you can do it that way for the lower price the next time. You can't do Photo-CD yourself, but you probably can't find any way to get better quality.
If you do the scans anywhere but at home, you'll need a way to bring them home. The choices are floppy disk, Zip disk, Photo-CD, and e-mailing the picture to yourself. For WebTV people, e-mailing it to yourself may be the only choice. Then you want to leave it in your in-box, to forward as needed.
If you make up your own page, there are two things you can do with it. One is that you can put it in your own web space, where you can control it yourself. The other is that you can send it to the webmaster, who can make it one of the Club Seattle pages.
If you put a page in your own web space, you can do pretty much anything you want with it. You still need to e-mail the webmaster so you can get a link to point to it, but otherwise it's all yours. The only rules you need to follow are those of the site where you put it, instead of the rules of our web site provider (and webmaster). On the down side, you need to learn how to make the site yourself. The webmaster might be able to help with this, if you ask nicely.
If you make up a page and send it to the webmaster, the web site provider rules apply. There are also some guidelines on how pages are supposed to look, so the webmaster might have to tinker with the page a little.
You need to either learn HTML, the language used to write web pages, or you need to get a web page editor, which is a program that looks like a word processor, but produces HTML pages instead of printed documents.
For fairly simple pages, like those here, it's easier to use HTML, although learning it in the first place isn't as easy. For complicated pages, a web page editor is probably easier.
If you want to learn HTML so you can write web pages yourself, the a good thing to do is to look at the HTML of pages others have written. With Internet Explorer, you can do that with the View Source command. Netscape has a similar command. You can also use a search site to find instructions and manuals on HTML.
One of the best web page editors is Microsoft Front Page. If it costs too much, you can get a simplified version for free with Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, although that might not be as good as some other web page editors you can get for free. Of course, if you really hate Microsoft, you'll also want something else. For more information, use a search site.
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SteveS currently maintains this page,
and created its initial content.
Page created in January 1998.
Last updated on 30 January 1998. (Minor revision on 5 January 2000.)
