BIO 542L: Graphic Publication for Biologists

Making a web page

Important References:


Information

The World Wide Web is the most significant new development for communicating scientific research since the development of the scientific journal nearly two centuries ago. It allows text, raw data, images, and even sounds and movies to be presented to an international audience at a relatively low cost to both the author and the reader. And like the early days of scientific journals, it is not yet formalized: only the Web versions of printed journals, and a very few entirely web-based journals, are clearly peer-reviewed, and anyone can post anything about any topic, accurate or not.

Although many of the problems relating to web-based publication remain to be solved, there is another use of the Web for scientific communication that is immediate. “Science” is a way of knowing, a body of knowledge, a set of conventions, but also a community of people with common interest. This community of people grows constantly larger, which interferes with your ability to find and communicate with the people that are important to your career as a scientist: researchers in your discipline, faculty of graduate or professional schools you might attend, potential employers, and more. Many of you have undoubtedly used the Web to find information about, or even communicate with, people in many of these settings. But none of them would be able to find you on the web. Until now.

You may have experienced “personal home pages” that were amalgamations of family, hobbies, pets, and “my favorite links”. These have their place, but what we are interested in here is the “professional home page” that lets other biologists know who you are and what you are doing. A professional home page can be extensive (mine is an example), but even a simple one is far better than no information at all (and you can always add to it).

Web pages are written in a special code called HTML (hypertext markup language). HTML uses tags to indicate formatting elements, links, placement of graphics, and many other things. (To see the HTML code for any web page, use the “view source” option of your browser.) Although you can make a web page by writing HTML directly, there are now many easier ways to do it.

Seemingly the easiest way would be to use the abilities of recent versions of Microsoft Word or other word processors to save documents directly in HTML format. Unfortunately, the web page that is produced will not always look like the original document, either as it appears on paper or on the screen. Word is perhaps the worst, inserting large amounts of white space between paragraphs, especially if paragraphs were originally separated by blank lines, and mountains of markup that only it and Internet Explorer understand. On the other hand, Word does a commendable job of converting imbedded graphics into separate graphics files and linking them into the web page.

There are many WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") web page editors, ranging in price from free to outrageously expensive. If you have Netscape version 4, 6, or 7, or Mozilla, you already have a WYSIWYG editor. Microsoft Front Page is available more or less for free through a campus site license (there are many good reasons to avoid using it, however). In lab, we will be using Dreamweaver from Macromedia, which is an “industry standard”, but you would have to buy a copy if you wanted it at home. These editors allow you to change font and formatting (to the extent allowed by HTML), insert links and graphics, and control other aspects of the web page. What you see, however, is not always what you get: it is important to remember that the same web page will look different even in different browsers, or in the same browser at different screen sizes.

And then there are “markup editors” that simplify the job of directly inserting HTML in your document. I use HomeSite, and there are many other capable ones, some for free. Markup editors require that you look at the page in a browser or a built-in viewer program to see what it looks like, but even with the WYSIWYG programs, it is a good idea to check out the pages in Netscape/Mozilla and Internet Explorer. (It is simple to open a web page on your hard disk with either program, and you don’t even have to be connected to the Internet to do it.)

Once your web pages are complete, you’ll need to transfer them to your Intranet account, and then they’ll be available for the world to see.


Assignment

Using any tools you wish, make a web page or pages. It (they) must contain the following elements:

  1. a “title” (something in the <title> spot other than a default such as “Untitled Document”)
  2. a background other than the default “no background color”, which on many browsers is a dim gray
  3. the name of the University and Department, and links to their home pages
  4. your name
  5. your email address, in the form of a “mailto”
  6. a disclaimer, such as the one on your default index.html or on my home page
  7. your thesis topic or title
  8. if you are a Teaching Associate, your office number and phone number

You may include anything else you want, keeping in mind that your web page should reflect your being a graduate student, it will be visible to the whole world, and that there are some restrictions on what you can do with a Cal Poly Pomona web page (see Cal Poly Pomona Computer Use Policies for details).

Post your web page on your Intranet account, either using the built-in Dreamweaver upload facility, by FTP, or by connecting the Intranet as a network drive (Windows or Mac). Your main page must be called index.html (it will replace the one that comes with your account) and it must be accessible, without a password, using the URL http://www.csupomona.edu/~username/, where username is your Intranet user name. If you have made additional web pages, they must all be linked to index.html and have the same access controls.

I would prefer that your web page remain public for the rest of the time you are at Cal Poly, and it must stay accessible through the end of the course. After that, if you prefer that it not be public, you may change its access controls to make it private, or simply delete it. Please let me know if you do this, however, so that I can delete the links to it.