VANITY,
THY NAME IS
VANITY,
THY NAME IS
WEB PAGE
by sonya hammond
[NOTE: Wandering the Net you are increasingly restless. You have begun obsessing over your puny black and white e-mail address. You suffer depression episodes in which you fantasize that you are the only person on the planet deprived of a hip new electronic status symbol with pretty pictures and colors.
Thanks to the complete blackout of your short-term memory, you interpret these early warning symptoms as merely the first stages of a cyberspace mystical experience. In a state of euphoria compounded by total denial, you actually envision your ability to achieve the next level of electronic competence. This stage is often referred to by recovering Newbies and anyone with an ounce of sense, as The End.]
Congratulations! In a
moment of weakness rivaled only by Dustin Hoffman's decision to
star in Ishtar, you spent your life savings on a machine
equipped with neat stuff like a dead mouse, a screen that tends
to fill up with colorful little pictures of more stuff with silly
names, and an invisible symbol of power called a Modem.
And by now, if you have faithfully followed this author's helpful instructions on what to do with Modems [See several previous articles in which helpfulness is implied], you should have set a world record for unsuccessful attempts to access the Internet.
Not that your efforts went unrewarded. There is every reason to believe that given sufficient time you could recover from the ulcer you acquired after accidentally downloading 826 news groups to your personal checkbook database. And thanks to increased medication, there has been progress in your rehabilitation from the trauma incurred after your system froze for three days on a Web page written entirely in Hungarian.
AND NOW ...
YOU WANT TO DO WHAT???
For reasons you will never be able to explain to your therapist, you actually believe that you are ready to create your own Web Page.
Never mind that you were sentenced to two months of group therapy after writing hate mail to Bill Gates when Windows 95 refused [in spite of claims of omnipotence] to make cappuccino.
Ok, so your HMO refuses to cover treatment of facial tics brought on by repeated Modem configuration failures. How tough can it be to take on a new skill for which you are the least qualified since Dan Quayle was tapped as VP?
The answer to this, and other questions you are completely incompetent to ask, is that learning to construct a nuclear power plant pales by comparison.
LEARN THE WALK, LEARN THE TALK
Prior to exercising any
latent creative skills you may be under the impression you
possess, you will need to encode everything you want to say in
plain English into something called HTML. Facility in this pitiful excuse for a
language, understood only by the Internet or possibly
Martians, is easily acquired by several methods:
In a sincere, but pointless, effort to make your contacts with cyberspace Really Fun, the author does not recommend either method. We see absolutely no point in learning a language that lacks verbs, is heavy with nouns of dubious lineage and limited usage [when was the last time you managed to work 'noflow' or 'blockquote' into a conversation?], and which for the most part consists of terminology resembling a lecture by Marlon Brando doing his Godfather shtick.
It is, therefore, the considered
opinion of the author that you should pick up your dead mouse,
point it at the nearest web page editor software site and, gasp, download [you'll just have to learn to do
it; we can't be expected to hold your hand forever]. Any one of
these nifty programs will practically create your web page for you
provided you can follow instructions even Dan Quayle would
understand. Well, maybe not, but almost anyone else will manage.
[DISCLAIMER: All terms, scientific or otherwise,
are either products of the author's unreliable imagination or
used completely out of context. Any resemblance to actual useful
information is strictly coincidental and, in most cases,
unintentional.]
© sonya hammond 1996