Creating your Own Web Page 

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Bruin OnLine now provides webspace to all account holders.  If you have a valid BOLid, your account on the web server has been activated and you are free to start creating web pages.

Web pages can be created 3 ways.

• You can create web pages using a text editor or publishing program and then FTP your HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) source to the server.
• You can create web pages using Netscape Composer and then publish them to the server.
• You can use the BOL Web Page Creator  to create web pages.  Learn more by visiting the BOL Web Service home page.

Your personal home page URL (Uniform Resource Locator) will be:

    http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~BOLid

where BOLid is your Bruin OnLine identification.

Creating a Web Page Using Netscape Communicator

Getting Started

• You should store your web page files in your local directory before publishing them to the Bruin OnLine server.  Create a directory on your h: (home) drive (for example, h:/webpage) to hold your files.

• In Netscape select File/New and choose either Blank or Template.  Blank will give you an empty screen to create a page from scratch. Template will let you choose from a set of existing pages which you can modify for your purposes.  This will open up the Netscape Composer which is similar to a word processor.

• From the Format menu select Page Colors and Properties.  This allows you to specify background and text colors for your page as well as give your page a name (which will show up when someone makes a bookmark of your page).

• Enter the text of your page as in a traditional word processor.  When you enter paragraphs of text, the browser used to display your page (for example, Netscape) will format the paragraph to fit the size of the window (i.e. the length of each line will change depending on the window size).  Entering a line-feed (Enter),  will cause automatic double spacing between what are considered paragraphs.  If you wish to control line length without double spacing, enter Shift/Enter.  This will single space between lines of text.

• You can use built in heading formats from the list box on the left hand side of the button bar, set font size and use bold, italic, and underline buttons.

• Horizontal line breaks can be entered as desired using the H.Line button.

• Bullet lists can be created by selecting the Bullet List button.

Before you can Preview your page (i.e. see how it will display in a browser), you must save the file.  Your Home Page (i.e. the page which will provide the entry point to your web content) must have the file name index.html.  Select Save As from the File menu, and save your page on the f: drive under your web page directory.  You can then preview your page by selecting the Preview menu on the Netscape Composer button bar.  Close the preview window when you wish to return to editing.  You should save and preview your page periodically in the development process.

You can insert image files into your page by selecting the Image button.  You will be asked to choose a file in which your image is stored.  You are also given options on where the image is to be positioned on a line and how text is to wrap around the image.  Once you select OK on the dialog the image will be inserted.  You can grab and drag the bottom right corner of the image to resize it.   Note, the text does not always looks as if it is wrapping correctly when you are in the editor.  Preview your page to see how the image will actually be inserted in the page.

You can grab images you see on the web by clicking the right mouse button on the image and selecting the Save Image As option from the pop-up menu.  Save the image file to your web page directory and you can then include the image on your page.

Highlight the text you wish to link and select the Link button.  The Link Character Properties dialog box will appear.
 
• You can add links to other locations on the web by entering a URL in the edit box.  For example, enter http://www.ucla.edu/bruinonline to set up a link to the Bruin Online home page.
• You can add links to other pages you have created by selecting a file name which is entered in the edit box.
• You can automatically send e-mail by entering mailto:e-mail address in the edit box.

Select the Publish icon on the button bar.  In the dialog box which appears you need to set the HTTP or FTP Location to Publish to:

     ftp://www.bol.ucla.edu/public_html/

Enter your Bruin OnLine user name and password.  You can then specify which files to publish (i.e. copy from your local h: directory to the Bruin OnLine server).  If you select the  All Files in Page's Folder radio button, all files in your local web page directory will be displayed in the list box.  You can select which ones you want to publish.  The first time you will probably want to publish them all.  After that you need only publish files which you have changed.