Chapter 17
In This Chapter
Putting material on the web
Showing off your family photos online
Posting documents and calendars online for viewing and editing by other people
Making your own website from scratch
Creating an online store or just selling random stuff
Back at the dawn of the World Wide Web (in 1989), the plan was that people all over the world would communicate among themselves — a virtual rustic global village. That isn’t exactly how it turned out, with giant megamalls like Amazon.com making the web a distinctly nonrustic experience. But after you’ve browsed the web for a while, you’ll probably think of putting your own material online. Hey, you’ve got interesting things to say, probably more interesting than a lot of websites you’ve surfed past!
Yes, it’s time to stop just browsing the web and start putting yourself out there in various ways. This chapter walks you through a bunch of ways to post information on the web and explains how to start with ones that are easy.
You can post information on the Internet in lots of different ways. Some require more start-up effort than others. Here’s an overview of the best methods for putting your own information online:
We love sharing our family photos with other people, and the web makes it easy. Also, sharing over the web saves you the cost of making extra prints of your snapshots, and it’s quick. Several websites enable you to upload your digital pictures to the sites and share the pictures with your friends and family. These free photo-sharing sites make their money by selling prints — after your family sees that gorgeous shot of little Daisy finger-painting with pudding, they’ll have to have a copy for the fridge!
You can try one of these photo-sharing sites:
After you create an account at one of these sites, you can upload photos into online photo albums by filling out forms on the website. Then you can share your albums with your friends. If you want, you can make your photos on these sites invisible to the general public — only to the people with whom you share the album.
You (and your friends) can also order prints of your uploaded photos — that’s how these sites make their money. The prices for prints are reasonable, and we find these systems convenient. You can print your photos as calendars, cards, books, and even postage stamps.
Several programs help you organize the pictures on your computer as well as upload and share them online. Picasa is the Google photo management program, which you can download from www.picasa.com or picasa.google.com. The program finds the photos on your computer (identifying them by their filename extensions) and helps you organize, caption, and edit them. You can then upload the photos or albums to the website for sharing with your friends and family. Figure 17-1 shows the Picasa photo sharing website.
Have you ever wished that you could share a spreadsheet or word processing document with other people, and maybe even let them make changes? Suppose that you’re the commissioner of a fantasy football league and you want to share a spreadsheet of players and their statistics with the other players. Yeah, you can email a spreadsheet to everyone, but what if you make updates? Instead, you can upload the spreadsheet to a document-sharing site and share it with the other players.
Or, a document or spreadsheet might be just for you, but you may need to be able to edit it from more than one computer. Our kids use a document sharing site to work on their school papers both at home and at school — it’s much easier than copying their files to a thumb drive or disk, which they’d probably forget on the kitchen counter, right next to their lunch.
Document sharing sites let you use the web as your word processing, spreadsheet, or presentation program, storing your files online. You can see, edit, and print your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from any computer that’s on the Internet. In fact, these sites are so good that some people use them for all their documents and spreadsheets, even if they have word processing and spreadsheet programs on their computers.
The most popular document sharing site is Google Drive, at drive.google.com. Its applications, called Docs (word processor), Sheets (spreadsheet), and Slides (presentations) don’t support every advanced feature of Microsoft Word and Excel and Powerpoint, but they handle all the basics. Figure 17-2 shows a Google Docs word processing document. The toolbar just above the document provides formatting options, much like a “real” word processor, and the menu bar (File, Edit, View, and so on) provides other features. You can print your spreadsheet, presentation, or document or export it to your computer as a normal document file that office programs such as Microsoft Office or the freeware LibreOffice can handle.
To get started with Google Drive, follow these steps:
Or, if you’re already signed in at another Google site, click Drive on the list of Google services at the top of the screen. Either way, you see the Google Drive screen, with a list of the files you can view or edit.
Google Drive uploads the file and creates a new document, presentation, or spreadsheet you can edit and share.
Hey, the Create menu has a bunch of other options, too (maybe more since we wrote this chapter), such as Drawing, which is a simple paint program.
Google creates a new file of the type you chose and displays it on the screen, with the appropriate menu bar and icons for editing.
If you made a spreadsheet, click in a cell and then type in it. To edit a cell, double-click it or click it and press F2.
Google saves your data in the cloud — in one of the innumerable web servers that Google maintains and that you never have to see or worry about. Your changes are saved as you edit, so you’re unlikely to lose your work.
Google has Drive, Docs, and Sheets apps for Windows, Mac, and most mobile devices. The Drive app for Windows and Mac make your Drive folders appear to be on your computer. The ones for mobile devices have an app for Drive, and separate apps for Docs, Sheets, and Slides so you can view and (with some difficulty) edit files on your device.
After you have a document or spreadsheet or presentation in Google Drive, you can share it with other people. Choose File⇒Share and cut-and-paste or type email addresses into the People box. Click Can Edit if you want to allow them to make changes to your document or spreadsheet, or Can Comment to let them add comments, or Can View if they can look but not touch. Enter the text of the email message that Google Drive will send to invite them to look at your document or spreadsheet, and click Share.
Your invitees receive a message explaining how to access the information you’re sharing.
A handy kind of information you can share is an online calendar. Maybe your club, church, theater, or another organization holds public events. Or, maybe it has a schedule of meetings to share with a small group of people. Either way, you can make an online calendar, enter events or meetings on it, and make it available for viewing or editing.
Google Calendars, at www.google.com/calendar, enables you to make one or more calendars, share them with other people, and make them public. You can display more than one calendar, overlaid in different colors, so that you can see your own events alongside your friends’ or co-workers’ events. Microsoft has a similar service at calendar.live.com.
Margy’s family has a Google calendar for tracking family events. On the computer in her kitchen, family members refer to the online calendar rather than to the traditional, coffee-stained, paper wall calendar. They sync their family Google calendar with the calendars on their smartphones or other devices, such as the iPhone, iPad, and Android phone. (Okay, we are geeks, but having a shared family calendar with us all the time sure is convenient! John, on the other hand, thinks that a Google calendar is no substitute for a paper calendar with pictures of Japanese anime cartoons.)
Not surprisingly, Microsoft has decided to play this game, too. If you go to Microsoft Office Online, at products.office.com/en-us/office-online, you can create (surprise!) documents, presentations, and spreadsheets, saved in your OneDrive account. To get started, sign in with your Windows Live account, such as your Hotmail account (or make one for free).
Microsoft also offers Office 365, which is a subscription version of their desktop office software suite. For $100/year, you can run Office on up to five PCs and Macs, and up to five mobile devices. Files can be stored either on the computer or in the cloud. If you have a bunch of PCs, the pricing is often cheaper than buying software separately for each.
Sometimes you don’t want all the help that Google Drive offers, editing and reformatting files, you just want to stash files somewhere that lets you and perhaps your friends download them, exactly as you uploaded them, with less hassle than trying to mail everything around as attachments. We use cloud storage for collections of full resolution photos from a camera, and audio recordings we’ve made of events. The most popular service is Dropbox. To store or share files in Dropbox, follow these steps:
Visit www.dropbox.com, click Sign Up, and create an account. Choose the free basic account which is plenty for most people; you can always upgrade to a paid account if it turns out you need more space.
Usually you can just drag files into the Dropbox browser window, and they’ll upload automatically. Failing that, click the Upload icon (a rectangle with a small plus sign) to get an upload menu. Uploading large files can take a while, so look at the progress meter at the bottom of the screen to see what’s going on.
They download to your computer.
The first time you do this, they’ll ask you to confirm your email address by clicking in a link they send you. Once you’ve done that, they show you a URL you can copy and paste into email or instant messages, or they offer to send mail for you. When the recipient clicks on the URL, they see your Dropbox file or folder, which they can download.
Although Dropbox is the most popular cloud storage provider, there are plenty of others:
It’s important to keep backups of your files, and Dropbox or another cloud storage service can keep backup copies in the event of a hard disk failure, power surge, fire, or flood.
At the beginning of this chapter, we list a bunch of ways you can put information on the web. These ways are terrific, just terrific — we love them all — but they may not be enough for you. What if you want more? What if you need a website with a bunch of pages, with titles you choose, about topics you choose, and maybe even with your own domain name? Okay, you’re ready for the next step.
You have (as usual) several ways to create a website, beyond using Facebook, photo sharing sites, and blogs. The simplest is to use a page creator site. At these sites, you can design the look of your site, create a home page for the site, and create as many other pages as you want. Different pages can have different layouts. You don’t have to learn to use HTML, the formatting language used by all web pages; see the later sidebar “Why you don’t care (much) about HTML.”
Page creator sites offer a variety of features, so look carefully before choosing one:
Here are some page creator sites we know about:
All these sites make creating your own website incredibly easy — for free. You can add pages, add text and pictures to the pages, and create links in the text. Most page creator sites provide a bunch of other items you can add to your pages, such as a calendar, a weather report, a Google map, a blog, an MP3 music player, and videos. For example, you can include a map to your church’s or club’s meeting location.
Creating a web page is easy. Choosing what to put on your page, however, is harder. What is the page for? What kind of person do you want to see it? Is it for you and your family and friends and potential friends across the world, or are you advertising your business online?
Consider which information you want the entire world to know, because a website is potentially visible to absolutely anyone, including that guy who has hated you ever since fifth grade. If your page is a personal page, don’t include your home address or phone number unless you want random people who see the page potentially calling you up. If it’s a business page, include your address, phone number, and any other information that potential customers might want.
Selling stuff on the Internet used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of software and programming talent. A number of sites now let you create web stores for modest fees. Here are a few:
To set up a store, you sign up for a free account at the website and then click the link to create the store. You provide information about the items you sell, including descriptions, prices, and shipping costs. On eBay, you’re usually paid by PayPal; on Craigslist, buyer and seller usually meet in person and pay in cash or with a local check; for everyone else, the site typically accepts credit cards and deposits your share to your own bank account.
To sell an item on Half.com (or any other consignment site), first find the item you want to sell. Half specializes in books, movies, and music, and it has almost everything in print in its database. When you find your item, click the Sell My Copy link, specify the condition of the item, add a description, and state your asking price. When you click the List Item link, your listing goes into the Half.com database and appears on the site within an hour. When you sell your item — which can be minutes, hours, or months later — Half.com keeps a commission.
Selling an item on eBay is similar for books, CDs, and DVDs, but for other items it can be a little more complicated. You write a description for the item and take or scan a digital picture of it. Start at www.ebay.com, click the Sell tab or link, and follow the directions. Auctions can last as long as seven days, or you can set up a fixed-price offer with no end date. eBay charges you a listing fee, although if your item doesn’t sell, you can usually relist it (try again, perhaps with a lower starting price) for free. Click Customer Support in the upper-right corner of any eBay page, and then click Selling & Seller Fees for instructions and hints for selling.