How to get a homepage for your chorus
Here's a little info to any choruses who may be interested in opening
up a homepage (website) for their chorus. There are many places on the web
where you can open up a free website (ie, Angelfire.com, Xoom.com, GeoCities.com,
Homestead.com). These places (servers) usually tell you that they will post
an advertising banner or other types advertisements on your web site in
exchange for their free service.
I have tried all the website servers above, and several others, and Angelfire.com
is by far the easiest to work with, the most reliable, the fastest, and
as you have seen, the least intrusive as far as advertisements are concerned
- I have yet to see the first ad at the MAMC site.
Angelfire, as well as the other 3 I listed, do not allow adult related material
on their servers. If this website is blocked by any filtering software on
your system, you may reassure your system administrator that this is a clean
site.
So what's involved in getting this going? Well, simply
go to one of these sites and register for your web site (find the button
that says "Register"). You will be given a password to use to
access your site and then you can post the information you want.
Is it difficult to do? No - the stuff you see on the world
wide web is written in a special language called html. It actually is quite
a simple language to learn, but you don't have to learn it if you
don't want. (It is advisable to learn the very basics of html - there are
tons of resources on the internet to instruct you - and as I said, the basics
of html are not complicated. You can learn in in a few minutes of reading).
Here's a sample of what a page really looks like in html - it's the html
from the Update Page.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Update Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#cdfbfe" LINK="#1f0eff" VLINK="#fb09f5">
<H1 ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#FF0000">Watch this
page for updates</FONT></H1>
<P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE=+2>This
page now contains only
the latest updates.<BR>
Older updates are now on the </FONT>
<FONT SIZE=+2><A HREF="oldup.html">Update Archives</A>
</FONT><FONT COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE=+2> page</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=CENTER><FONT COLOR="#FF0000"><HR SIZE="3"
NOSHADE></FONT></P>
REMEMBER - you don't have to know a great deal about html.
But, instead of writing your postings in html, you use a program that will
save your document as an html document. These programs are called html editors.
Also, the latest versions of most word processing programs like Microsoft
Word, and Clarisworks will also save documents as html documents
Here is what I am doing to post this on the web. I am typing this
up in Clarisworks. When I am finished, I will save it as an html document.
Then I go to angelfire.com, log on with my password, and select this file
to upload (send) to the angelfire.com server. That's it - it's on the web!
You have 2 resources to help you get started with opening up a website for
your chorus. Dave Thomas, former director of South St. Paul, and the webmaster
for the AMCA website (http://www.tc.umn.edu/nlhome/m042/thoma075/amca.html),
has expressed a willingness to help choruses get started, and I would also
be willing to help choruses get going on a chorus homepage.
If you want more information, e-mail me or talk to me at the Big Sing.
I give you this information for whatever.com
it is worth!
