DISCLAIMER

This page is not intended in any way to be a comprehensive or hardcore HTML guide (If you're looking for that, here is a great page of links to various html help pages.). It IS intended to benefit the amateur HTML coder by giving him/her a summary of time-saving and useful techniques for making a good-looking web page which I had to find out through experimentation, accident, and blind luck.

So, you've got a spiffy new homepage. You've tried centering everything (which looked like hell in most cases), you've tried every damn background color / text color combination you could think of (90% of which were totally unreadable), and God knows how many times you forgot to end an italicized section, leaving three quarters of your page looking way too excited for its own good. Where can you go from here? The answer, my friend, is: You can go FAR!

GENERAL COPYING AND PASTING TECHNIQUE

I had been using Windows for years, but it took an obsession with dicking around with my web page to make me stumble on the mind-bogglingly simple fact that cutting and pasting is almost always context-independent. In other words, if you see text on the screen, you can copy it and paste it into a word processing file REGARDLESS OF THE NATURE OF THE TEXT. It might be a cell in a spreadsheet, a paragraph from a piece of E-Mail, or a URL displayed on a web page you're currently browsing. Doesn't matter. If you want it, just grab it.

TWO GREAT REASONS FOR CUTTING AND PASTING

1. URLs can be case-sensitive, and you never know when they will or won't be. Copying and pasting makes exact copies of whatever text you find, so you don't have to worry about it.
2. Time. You won't remember how you got along without it once you become facile at copying and pasting. Think of all the time you spend retyping URLs, pieces of code, or chunks of a really funny e-mail you want to send to someone. You'll never waste another moment on that once you learn a few simple steps.

1. Put your mouse cursor at one end of the text you want to copy.
2. Click and hold.
3. drag the mouse to the other end of the text. The selected text will appear to be white-on-blue rather than black-on-white, or give some such indication of being selected.
4. Unclick.
5. Right-click. A little window should pop up. (If right-clicking doesn't work, you'll probably have to go to the "Edit" menu of the current window.)
6. Select "Copy" from this menu. The selected text is now in the clipboard, a place where your computer temporarily stores information for pasting.
7. Stick the cursor where you want a copy of the text to be inserted in the target document.
8. Right-click. (or use the "Edit" menu)
9. Select "Paste". The contents of the clipboard are now rudely shoved into the space where your cursor was(or pasted OVER the section you selected) in the target document.

SWIPING NIFTY IMAGES FROM THE WEB

• VIEW SOURCE: The source code for any web page is just a few clicks away. The method depends on your browser. With Microsoft I.E., just right-click anywhere on the page. From the menu which pops up, chose "View Source".
• FINDING URLs AND PUTTING COOL IMAGES ON YOUR PAGE
  • To find the URL of a web page: Just right-click on the background or text on a page. Chose "Properties" from the pop-up menu.
  • For images:
    1. Right-click on the image and select "properties".
    2. A menu comes up with either the URL for the picture, or the page.
    3. If it gives the URL for the image (It will probably end in .gif or .jpg) just open up a spreadsheet or word-processing document where you'll store all your nifty URLs and paste the URL into that document for future reference(see above).
    4. If the URL is that of the page, perform the last step with the page URL and perform the following extra steps:
    5. (Say you just pasted the URL "http://www.crud.crap.garbage.html" into your handy-dandy spreadsheet.) Right-click again and select "view source".
    6. Scan down until you find the place where the name of the picture is called out. (Say it says "img src = trashpic1.gif". Go on, say it.)
    7. Copy the filename (in this case, "trashpic1.gif") to your clipboard.
    8. Reopen your Handy Dandy Spreadsheet (TM) and select the filename of the page URL (in this case "garbage.html).
    9. Paste the image filename from your clipboard right over the filename of the page's URL ("garbage.html"). You should now have a cell in your H.D.S that looks like "http://www.crud.crap.trashpic1.gif".
    10. Now to have that image appear on your own page, just insert the code(in brackets): img src = http://www.crud.crap.trashpic1.gif