WELCOME TO THE WEBSITE-BY-EMAIL TUTORIAL MAILING LIST
This is a pre-subscription message, intended for the archive.
This message has two sections
* Introduction
* Background & Context -- Posting To Accmail, July 99
-------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
There are many people in the world who have limited access to the
Internet. Email-only services are very common. While it is quite
easy to obtain web pages with an email service, it is much more
difficult to create a web presence. However, it can be done.
'website-by-email' is a short-term mailing list with a single
objective: to provide a tutorial (as a public archive of information
and experiences) which may be useful to anyone who wishes to create
and maintain a web presence using email-only methods.
What we hope you will do is try to set up a web page using the
methods we describe. Your experiences could be very helpful to other
people, so please report your problems, solutions and sucesses.
If you are reading this, it is probably because you want to do it
yourself. Please help to create the resource you are looking for.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
BACKGROUND & CONTEXT -- POSTING TO ACCMAIL, JULY 99
I am still getting regular requests for an updated version of my
guide to setting up a web site by email at Angelfire. The Angelfire
tutorial is now out of date and I have no plans to replace it. This
notice explains why -- and suggests a more useful alternative.
I wrote the Angelfire tutorial as a resource for my students at the
University of ******** who wanted a WWW showcase for their research
projects. It involved me in a lot of work, but I thought it would be
worthwhile. But in the end, none of those students actually created
an Angelfire site by email -- it was just too complicated. The
tutorial described how to submit the registration, upload and
maintenance forms using GetWeb, but it was a tedious and
time-consuming process, made more difficult by erratic availability
of the GetWeb servers and unannounced modifications to the Angelfire
cgi scripts.
Last year, I investigated InternetTrash.com -- a free web site
provider with an idiotic name that provides and encourages an email
gateway for registration, page uploading and maintenance. It really
is easy to use, but InternetTrash has one huge disadvantage -- their
own self-portrait ...
<QUOTE>
The only place for tasteless, useless, trashy,
politically incorrect, rude, silly, stupid,
meaningless, obnoxious, waste of bandwidth
homepages! Normal & ordinary homepages also welcome!
</QUOTE>
The message is quite clear -- juvenilia only. Nobody who wants to be
taken seriously could contemplate a home page at InternetTrash.
Fortunately, there is a plausible (though unstable) solution -- you
could set up an InternetTrash home page, but refer to it by its IP
number. For example, if your real home page URL were
http://www.internettrash.com/users/deadcat/
you could tell your contacts to visit
http://209.236.159.6/users/deadcat/
They need never be distracted by the domain name.
The InternetTrash email submission process (in contrast to the
Angelfire-GetWeb method) is very simple. Although some of the cgi
scripts at InternetTrash seem to be bugged (especially when decoding
MIME attachments), it does not merit a long tutorial.
However, in my experience, a greater problem for people who don't
have frequent WWW access is knowing how to design web pages for a
specific audience or to meet pre-determined objectives, and finding
ways to measure their success. For example, if the purpose of your
web site is to support applications for jobs and scholarships, or to
promote a cause, idea or theory -- you need some basic WWW-literacy
to understand how your pages will be perceived by the people you are
aiming at.
I suggest a collaboration between people of different backgrounds
and requirements would result in a far more valuable and enduring
resource than any that a single person could produce.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
15 July 1999, 17:17