At ICON'S May general meeting, Mick Topping gave a brief overview of personal web pages, touching on many of the basic considerations for building and publishing a web page.

There are many reasons for publishing a personal web page, from just having fun to learning new things about the possibilities of personal computing. One of the most common is to put genealogical information and/or family photos out for others to share.

Web page design is a very broad topic with thousands of variations. The future of communication is the Internet. The possibilities are both fascinating and endless!

There are several ways to build your web page. You can use a free service such as Yahoo, Geocities, MSN, etc. where the software tools are provided for you. There will be some advertisements such as banners and pop-ups on your page, but it is a very simple, fun, and free way to publish a personal site.

You can set one up in similar fashion to Mick's personal page, which is basically his Internet favorites set in frames. This can be done by finding a web page laid out similar to what you want, altering it to suit your own needs by learning some basic HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), and then inserting your own content into the frames. This is also a simple way to have your own page.

You can also purchase software programs such as Microsoft's "Front Page," or many others that will help you create a unique page that reflects your own artistic flare.

Regardless of why or how you decide to create and post your page to the world wide web, it is helpful to learn and understand some basic HTML so you can tweak the code to make your page display just the way you want.

As Mick suggested during his presentation, if you want to learn how to create, publish, and maintain your own personal web page, start attending the Surf the Net SIG and let us know you are interested. If enough ICON members want to have their own web site, we will start a new SIG dedicated to this endeavor.

Mick also demonstrated an impressive new program that allows the user to soar above the earth and zoom in on any location around the globe. Some cities/areas have very high-resolution pictures and some are much lower resolution. This appears to be a melding of video game technology and satellite imagery.

Mick explained that your computer must be equipped with a high-end graphics card by "Nvidia" (approximately $100.00) in order to process the images fast enough for it to work properly. This is a subscription service costing $50.00 per year to access the database. Some may think this is expensive but I think it is the most impressive and fascinating new software technology I have seen recently. If you want to find out how to acquire this service, e-mail Mick at: mick@mtopping.com

Happy Computing,
Terry