web hosting

If you want to go beyond the blog format to be able to have pictures, syllabus, etc. as part of your website, you're going to need online space to hold that information. The problem is that online space costs money. Often your internet service provider will give you an amount of storage space so check with them before paying for anything. For example, I know that sonic.net offers 80 mb of storage space which is plenty of room for any sort of website we would make.

If you want to have your own special domain name like www.mygreatclass.net you have to pay for it. One of the cheapest webhosting providers (which give you domain names and online storage space) is www.buckwebhost.com. The cost is $25 to register the name and then $2 per month.

adding links to your blog

Adding links to your blog is fairly simple. Log into your blog and go to the template page. There is a box there with lots of geek speak sorts of things. This is affectionately known as HTML (hypertext mark up language), which are the ingredients and recipe that make up your website. If you scroll down, most likely toward the bottom, you will see something that looks like this:


<!-- Begin #sidebar -->
<div id="sidebar"><div id="sidebar2">


Any text you write below this tagline will appear in the sidebar of your blog. If you would like to make a list of links you need to use the format below. This is an example of the way I added links to this blog. Be sure to put in the entire web address, including the http:// part.

I suggest that you copy the lines below and paste them into you blog.


<ul>
<li>L I N K S</li>
<li><a href="http://www.petalumajuniorhigh.org/">pjhs home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.petalumacityschools.org/">petaluma city schools home</a></li>
<li><a href="http://staff.tuhsd.k12.az.us/createwebsite.html">additional resources</a></li>
</ul>


You can add as many links as you want as long as they are listed above the </ul> tag and each line is formatted like this:
<li><a href="COMPLETE WEB ADDRESS">TITLE OF LINK</a></li>

If you would like further and more in depth tutorial on HTML go to www.cwru.edu/help/introHTML/toc.html

what's a blog?

One of the easiest ways to make a website, that I've found, is to use a web log or blog. This website itself is a blog. The best thing about a blog is how easy it is to update. You can add comments to your blog from any computer with internet access. Blogs are also perfect for homework assignments, announcements, food for thought or links to other websites, etc. Finally, blogs are easy to set up. There are services like blogger.com that provide you with templates for your blog design and offer free hosting of your blog.

Check out blogger.com and see what you think! It is very quick and easy to get started with a basic blog. I can also (try) to help you add more to your blog beyond the initial set up.

Cheerio!

Hello!

Welcome to our own website to help us create websites!