Before you jump into building your page there are a few of things you should know how to do. Believe me it is much easier to learn this now then later on when you will be saying to yourself what are these people talking about!

Keyboard F Keys

On the Webtv keyboard there are a series of seven F keys numbered 1-7. These are not like the function keys on a computer keyboard that perform certain tasks. Our F keys are shortcuts to websites that you program into the keys. They are invaluable when it comes to page building. I will give you four sites to start with but remember you can change your preferences at any time.

The Validator
http://www.warpspeedhelp.com/validate.html

Star Blvd. Transloader
http://transload.starblvd.net/npw-tl.shtml

Image Magic
http://magick.iacta.com/

Geocities Home
http://geocities.yahoo.com/home/

Go to your Favorite Folders and open a new folder and call it, let's say, Geo Page. Of course you can call it anythng you like. Click on each of the above links and save them to that folder. When you are at the folder click on organize and then shortcuts. You then assign an F key to each of these sites.

Star Blvd Transloader

To get content to our File Manager, be it gif, jpeg, or midi files, we have to ultilize a service called a transloader. There are several available but the one I have shown here is the one I use. Files are transferred from one server to another through a process known as FTP. It is not important for you to know how it works technically but how to use it. It is really quite simple. I will use a midi music file as an example. We will start by going to BGsound.com http://www.bgsound.com/ You can go to any music site you want. I will list some links to other sites later in the lessons. For this example I click on Classic Rock. Scroll down through the artists to one that you like. Choose a song and click on play. When the music starts press the goto button on the top of your keyboard. A pop-up will appear with a window. Click on show last. The URL for the song will appear. Hold down the command (cmd) key on your keyboard and hit the A key. The window will be high-lighted. While still holding down the cmd key press the C key; you will hear a clicking sound. You now have a copy of the URL for your song in your cache. Now press the F key that you have assigned for the Transloader. You will be taken directly to the Transloader. Move cursor down to second line (Source URL). Delete http:// from this line so nothing is showing in the box. Now hold down the cmd key on your keyboard and press the V key. Your URL will appear in the box. You will then enter the following information.

Rename: if you want rename the file just keep the same file type (ex.gif)
Target FTP Server: ftp.oocities.com
Target Account Name: Your Geocities Name
Target Account Password: Your Geocities Password
Upload directory: If you want you can upload to a sub-directory just enter name of sub-directory.

You can ignore the other options for now. Next click transload file.[note; if you click on little "teardrop" at the end of each line your info wll be remembered via a cookie so you don't have to re-enter it each time] You will be taken to another page and then re-directed again to the page showing transload info. If system is busy you may have to hit reload to see your information. When you scroll down and see that file transfer was a success. it is important to hit the ZAP button. This clears your information from the system. Now hit F key you have reserved for Geocities. Go to File Manager and you will see your file listed.

The process of transfering an image file is the same as that for sound. Just repeat the above steps for each image. One of the limitations of Webtv is that we have to transfer files one at a time. Now play with this. Have some fun. Practice transfering some files. You can't hurt or break anything here and if you run into problems help is only an e-mail away.

The Validator

The Validator, will among other things, extract individual gifs from a page of clipart. While viewing a clipart page click the assigned F key and when you are taken to the Validator your URL will be displayed in the two windows there. Click on view images and you will see a report from Dr. HTML showing you the individual images. Simply click on the name of the image that you were after and it will appear on a page by itself. Now all you have to do is transload it.

Image Magic

At this site you can really have fun. You take a URL for a page here and it wll tell you the size of the image. The attributes will be given for height and width and it will also tell you how many colors an image contains. You can manipulate all of your images here. Best of all there is a link to a very well written tutorial right on the front page.

Cut Copy Paste (CCP)

This is another skill to learn that is easy to master. Especialy since you have been doing CCP already while transloading. It is a process where we change the position of text be it a single word or an entire paragraph. You can not only change the position of text on the page you are viewing but you can also move it to another page. Say you come accross a paragraph on a page that you would like to send to someone. You could send them the URL of the page, tell them to view it and book mark or save it for themselves. Send them the entire page. Or, by utilizing CCP you can send them an e-mail with only the paragraph attached that you wanted them to receive. The first two options will get the page to them but they would still have to search for the paragraph.

The first key we will be using is the highlight key. This is your A key. Press and hold down the command (cmd) key and press A. This entire page will be high-lighted. Press cmd and A again and the highlight will be removed. You would very rarely want to high-light an entire page but this does come in handy sometimes when you would like to add contrast to certain pages to make them easier to view. The next key we use is the C key. This key will copy the text we have high-lighted. You have already been using both of these functions while transloading.

Now the fun begins. Let's say we wanted to send the above paragraph to someone. We already know that if we choose cmd A we will high-light the entire page. What we want to do now is only high-light the above paragraph. On the top of your keyboard press the "find" key. A pop-up will appear with a window. Type "The first"; these are the first two words of the paragraph we want. Did we high-light them? No, we went beyond them to where the same two words appear together in the previous paragraph. Hold your cmd key and and press G (for go) you will be taken to the proper two words. If you wanted to go back you would hold cmd and press B (for back). To avoid the above problem you can type in the entire first sentence of a paragraph. Either way will give you the same result. Now hold down your shift key. The arrow keys will now control the amount of text that will be high-lighted. The down arrow key will high-light each full line of text. The up arrow key will remove the high-light a line at a time. The right arrow key will high-light one character at a time and the left arrow key will remove the high-light one character at a time. Using the shift and arrow keys high-light the entire paragraph. Now hold cmd and press C to copy. You can now place that paragraph in let's say an e-mail. To insert the copied text you would hold cmd and press the V key.

The very last command we will be learning is cut. After high-lighting a letter, word or paragraph you can cut them out by using cmd plus X. This will remove the text and save it in your system's cache. You can then insert it somewhere else, if you like. If you would like to remove text permanently use cmd plus the delete key. If you are going to be moving text around on the same page after copying hold cmd and A. You will high-light the entire page. Hold cmd and press A again and all high-lighting will be removed. You can use the HTML test bed below to practice.

¸·•HTML And Javascript Test-Bed¸•·