<h2>The Web Tool Kit And Publishing Your First Web Page</h2>
<img class="alignleft" title="Web Tool Kit" src="http://www.biggles2k.com/images/teaching/web_toolkit.jpg" alt="Web Tool Kit" width="200" height="200" />This page summarizes the first of approximately 13 sections that I will teach during the Spring semester of 2011. Generally, sections last between an hour-and-a-half to two hours and are attended by at least a half-dozen students willing to sacrifice their Monday evenings with me. I spend the first half of a section doing a song-and-dance with PowerPoint and online demonstrations; the latter half is spent giving hands-on help to students as they work to complete their assignments.

My first section of the semester includes introductions, a brief summary of the course, and, more importantly, giving students an opportunity to publish an actual web page. Of course, some students are already accomplished at this last task, but for many others, this is a first: Having their own web page, their own creation, as simple as it may be, out there for the entire internet see.

We overview what I call the Web Tool Kit, a suite of applications that the students will become intimately familiar with over the course of the semester. This software includes their web browser, the web server, a text editor of their choice, an SSH client for logging into the server, an SFTP client for securely uploading files to the server, and last, but surely not least, the Web itself.

Finally we delve into XHTML elements, the building blocks of the web, and once familiar with what an element looks like, we take a few and construct the skeleton of a web page. We don't necessarily go over individual elements or what they do--that's for later. For now, just knowing that these blocks can come together to form a web page is sufficient.

The final exercise involves taking this newly minted page and pushing it to the server. Here we cover concepts such as the basics of a URL, how a web server interprets a URL to find a web page, and how we prepare our files and folders to be found. Once everything is in place, we visit the web server and view our new, and sometimes first, web page, happy to see it meet us with a simple greeting, "Hello World!"

<a title="Section 1 Slides" href="http://www.biggles2k.com/teaching/section_01-slides.pdf"><strong>Section 01 Slides</strong></a> (PDF, 4.5MB)