Design Your Own Web

We’ve added 4 more video tutorials. These tutorials combine the GIMP (free graphics image editing software) and Nvu (free web page designer) to put some finishing touches on the earlier videos we offered.

These tutorials show step by step how to design a header image using the GIMP, how to insert that header image into Nvu and how to update the navigation from text to graphic images.

An example of the finished home page for the website is at My Poker Insights

Coming up next, we’ll finish the HTML tutorials and begin offering the CSS tutorials.

Stay tuned.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way of syndicating (sharing of content among different web sites) information of all sorts. This information can be news feeds (like CNN or CBS News) or can be from a personal blog (like this one). The language used to create RSS Feeds is called XML.

So what? Well, here’s how RSS can help you….

Understanding a little about RSS and XML allows you to subscribe to different news feeds. It allows you to literally design your own daily news choices.

For example, let’s say you just want to get the men’s basketball news. You can go and sign up for a news feed just for Yahoo’s Men’s College Basketball feed. And then you’ll be kept up to date on the college basketball scene automatically.

Now clicking that link won’t do you any good UNLESS you have a news reader.

A news reader is needed to decipher the XML language that the RSS news feed was generated. News Readers are designed to every once in a while (you determine the frequency) check ALL of your news feeds that you signed up for (you can sign up for tons if you wanted).

Once it checks them all, any updated news feeds are then displayed as headlines in the your news reader. You can then choose to read either the entire article or pass based on the headline or your interest or time.

Using news readers is a great way to keep updated and keep in touch with the websites you really enjoyed. Good RSS feeds will continually show you new and interesting things.

Here’s the step by step…

1) Get a news reader. There are many readers, most are FREE. You can get a desktop news reader (like Feed Reader) or you can go with an online reader (like MyYahoo, or Google Reader or Bloglines).

2) Go to a website that has a news feed or an RSS feed. Often times they’ll display some symbols like…

or or the new

3) Clicking on that symbol will only get you gibberish (or XML language). What you’ll need to do is to copy that feed code (http:// code in your address bar if you clicked on it OR just right click on the orange button and copy the link code) and then put it in your news reader. Typically there will be an option to ‘Add a new feed’ in your reader. Just paste that feed code into your news reader. You’ll then begin getting all the news feeds from that site.

4) You can add as many news feeds as you have time for. You can always delete them if you don’t have time or if they aren’t very good feeds.

5) News feeds are helpful in that they don’t get blocked by SPAM filters and you don’t have to give away any personal information (like email address) to sign up for a news feed. It puts you in charge of what you’d like to receive.

It’s been suggested that only about 15% of the population actually have news readers. But, with the release of the new Windows coming out soon, it will supposedly have a built in news reader and the popularity of news feeds will probably increase dramatically.

If you haven’t already, try out a news reader and sign up for some news feeds.

Our news feed is at the bottom of this page (the little RSS link in the blue bar). Design Your Own Web Newsfeed.

Until the next ‘What the heck??‘….see you then!

A blog is really slang for web log. But now it’s closer to a household term than slang. Amazingly, even our 9 year old knew what a blog was. She said it was a diary. Not bad for 9. And she’s right, but there’s really more to it (as always). For those of us not quite up to date, here’s some more insight on just what the heck a blog is.

A blog can actually be many things. It can be a personal journal, it can be a business tool, it can be a diary, it can be a reminder for you about cool website you’ve found, it can be a content management system, and it can really be a wide variety of things. If you have spent any time at all reading blogs, then you know what I am talking about.

The great thing about blogs is that anyone can create their own blog. Using free software you can have your own blog up and running in just minutes. Then you just write about what ever is on your mind. You can create a blog for your friends and family to share information, like pictures for example.

The best way to learn what a blog is by setting up your own. Here’s some tools to do just that:

Blogger – Google’s FREE blogging account tools.
Yahoo 360 – Yahoo’s FREE blogging.
MSN Spaces – MSN’s blogging account tools.

All the above are FREE and are hosted on their servers. If you want to host it on your own server, then try a blog program like WordPress or Moveable Type.

Some notable blogs of interest…

Design Your Own Webs’ Blog – This blog right here.
Ask Dave Taylor
Brad Fallon’s Blog
Massage Therapy Online

That should be enough to get you started. What you do with your own blog is up to you. It’s basically just a blank canvas waiting to be created…

Also just released are our GIMP video tutorials. We have 10 video lessons that go over the basics of how to use the GIMP. We’ve covered the tools, the dialogs, the file types for the web and much more.

The Gimp video tutorials are ALL free and are designed for people who have never used the GIMP before. Interestingly enough, though, once you learn the GIMP, other graphics software packages will be oddly familiar and probably just as easy to use.

Over the weeks, months and years to come we will be adding more and more tutorials for the GIMP…

Enjoy!

Our brand new Nvu video tutorials are now up and running. They are designed for the beginner in mind and teach the classic table layout. There are 9 video lessons right now that go through step by step how to design a website using the free web site editor Nvu.

We also offer step by step text instructions for those who don’t have a high speed connection. Because the videos are very large, you’ll definitely need high speed to watch them.

All the basic tutorials are free of charge. And there is even a bonus video lesson on how to add Adsense to your webpages you created with Nvu (since there’s some special instructions that are needed.)

Let me know what you think…

Coming soon will be the intro to CSS.

Soon to be launched in full, Design Your Own Web has already completed tons of tutorials using the free editors Nvu and the GIMP, with much more on the way!