Part of the Clay Basket Website. 7/22/96.

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Tutorials

Creating your first website

OK -- so you just downloaded Clay Basket. What do you have to do to get started making your first website?

First, launch the Clay Basket app. It may open your Netscape bookmark file. If you just want to do website building with CB, you can turn this feature off by choosing the Preferences item from the Netscape sub-menu of the Gems menu.

Create a new file, using cmd-N of course.

Type in a few headlines.

Not everyone knows how to use an outliner. Here's how you do it. Start typing. To enter a new line press Return. Keep typing headlines until you're finished. To indent a headline, press cmd-R. To move it out a level press cmd-L. To move it up at the same level press cmd-U, down is cmd-D. You can also move items using the mouse -- the usual way -- point at the line, hold the mouse down, point at its new location and let up.

Suggestions -- build an outline of all the schools you went to. Start with grade school, then do junior high, high school and so on. Underneath each school list the teachers you had. List some of your best friends. Another idea -- type in a list of places you've lived. Underneath each one list the things you remember about each of the places.

When you're done, reorganize your outline so you have a single summit, or top-level headline. All other material is subordinate to the summit headline. Put the cursor on this line by clicking on it with the mouse.

Save the file. It's a good idea to create a folder to contain the file because Clay Basket will automatically create several folders in the same folder as the outline file. They're called Input Folder, Output Folder, Upload Folder and Media Objects folder. I'll talk about these in a later message.

You know the rap about saving changes. Do it often. The outliner is memory based so if your system crashes you lose your work.

My outline

I did an outline of places I've lived. Here's a picture of the outline with the items underneath New Orleans expanded:


You can expand and collapse a headline by double-clicking on the wedge to the left of it. If it's black it means there's stuff collapsed underneath it. If it's light blue there's nothing to be gained by expanding it. This makes it easy for your eye to scan down the left edge of the outline looking for things you may not have seen. A nice way to navigate.

The connection to the web

In Clay Basket, with your cursor on the summit, choose Page Info from the Website menu. A small window opens. Here's what it looks like:


Change the author to "you@yourorg.com".

Click on "Subs on 1 Line" to turn this option off.

Be sure Netscape 1.1 or greater is running.

Click on the Update button.

There's the home page for the website!



Wow.

Every product has a hot feature, the one that everyone remembers. This is it.

Flip a switch in the outliner to see what the page looks like on the web.

When you're in Clay Basket, you're changing settings, tweaking things up, writing or editing text, or reorganizing the site. You make a change, flip a switch, see what it looks like in Netscape, then change something else, flip the switch, and over and over, until you're ready to upload.

It's a website editor. That's what it does.

Let's tweak it up and fill it out

This is a pretty homely home page! Let's fix it.

Back in Clay Basket, in the Page Info window, choose Subs & Mousetype from the Template popup menu. Click on Update. This is an appropriate template to use for a home page. Try out other templates and see what they do to change the rendering of the page in Netscape.

About templates -- they're just text files containing HTML text with special placeholders telling Clay Basket where to insert the page elements that it automatically generates. You can edit the existing templates or create your own. They're stored a sub-folder of the Global Resources folder.

Here's what my home page looks like:



Now, add some text to the home page. With the outline cursor on Places I've Lived, choose Edit Text File from the Website menu. A window opens. Type in the text. Save.

Here's a big keystroke -- you'll be using this one a lot. To rebuild the page and render it in Netscape, press cmd-single-quote. It's the Page Preview command in the Website menu.

Back in Clay Basket, in the text editing window... You can type html text here. Leave out the header info -- that's provided by the template file. You can use a different editor. Clay Basket's built-in text editor is very minimal. BBEdit is an excellent text editor. Wizzy html text editors such as Adobe's PageMill are coming soon. Use the Choose Editor command in the Gems menu to configure Clay Basket to launch a different program to edit the text files linked into your website outline.

How it all fits together

Every headline in the outline can have a text file linked to it. The text contains the basic information for the page. Using templates you can control which automatic elements appear and where and how they appear on the page. You can play with colors and other options. The outline structure determines the structure of the website. When you reorganize the outline, or add or delete headlines, the structure of the website changes accordingly.

What Clay Basket is about

Anyone who can use a Macintosh can build and manage a website. With no extra effort your website has consistent navigation links, allowing readers to go thru the site sequentially or navigate using the organization of the site.

Recommended Software

Here's a recommended suite of software to work with Clay Basket. None of this software is required to make Clay Basket work. If your site doesn't have pictures you won't need a picture editor. Clay Basket can generate beautiful and functional websites without a scripting environment backing it up. Clay Basket has a built-in text editor.

So, my recommendations...

For editing text, I recommend BBEdit 3.5. It's very nicely scriptable, when Frontier is running you can preview the page you're working on, with a single keystroke! Send me email if you want this feature, and I'll point you to the install file for Frontier that makes it work.

For editing pictures, I recommend Adobe PhotoShop 2.5 or greater. It's the standard for picture editing. I used to use Denba Artworks, but it doesn't run on my new PowerPC. In PhotoShop, to save files in CompuServe GIF format, be sure to choose Indexed Color from PhotoShop's Modes menu. Use Save As. The Compuserve GIF option will be enabled. Save the files in the Media Objects folder in the same folder as the outline for the website.

Transparency 1.0 is a necessary tool for making your pictures look good on any background.

Fetch 2.1.2 is great for managing remote websites. It's not absolutely required since Clay Basket 1.0b5 includes an FTP client optimized for uploading lots of small text files. As of 1.0b5 you can't delete files or create directories on the server from within Clay Basket. Coming sooooon.

For running scripts, I use Frontier 4.0b2 for PowerPC. Without Frontier you don't get the glossary, one of the coolest features in Clay Basket. Clay Basket can call inline macros (another hot feature) in any Open Scripting Architecture compatible language, so you can generate HTML text programmatically in AppleScript or Frontier's UserTalk language, and if we get lucky, from MacPERL or Java.

This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Mon, Jul 22, 1996 at 10:35:47 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave