I read several computer magazines each month. Lately, I've started to see references to personal portals. They are web sites which are lists of your favorite links that you build for yourself to make navigating the Web easier and more organized. Often, search sites offer to build these for you, if you just answer some questions about what you want to see. It's convenient, but by answering those questions, you're giving them some really important information. If you're not eager to share sensitive facts with a commercial site and you don't mind a little work, I've got some other options for you.
Before we get too far into the article, here's a URL to see what a personal portal is like: http://www.dvorak.org/home.htm. This is the personal portal of John Dvorak, a prominent computer columnist. He's gone the route that we're going to go; he built his own personal portal, rather than let a service do it for him. His portal is very fancy, built by a commercial program. I'm going to show you how to do plain vanilla portals; you can add the spice yourself if you want. By the way, I'm going to talk a fair amount about things you can get your browser to do, but I'm not always going to tell you how to do them. The terminology and procedure for doing these things changes often and is different among browsers. This article would be way too long if I covered browser-specific actions in any detail. Poke around a bit with your browser and you'll learn some really neat features.
You might wonder what a personal portal can offer you that your bookmark list can't. The biggest reason I like them is that you can set up your browser to automatically go there when you start it up, or when you hit the "Home" button. Since the portals we'll be building are local to your PC, there is also a speed advantage versus a net-based portal. I use my bookmark file as a "short-term memory" of sites. It gets purged regularly. Anything that has more lasting interest goes in the portal.
So, how do we make a portal? If you're a Netscape user, you have a simple option; you can just load your bookmark file. There are no negatives I know of in doing this. You do have to find it, however. If you're using Windows 95 or 98, you can use the "Find" menu under the "Start" button; look for "bookmark.htm". Otherwise, you may have to fiddle with the "Edit Bookmarks" option in the "Bookmarks" menu of your browser to find the path. Once you've found it, go to the browser "File" menu and load the bookmark file. This makes for a pretty good looking portal. If you want to do much more however, you might want to choose one of the other options I give below. By the way, if you're an Internet Explorer user, this option won't work. Microsoft chose to handle its bookmarks differently, so you can't access them in this way.
Another option that might suit your needs is a program called Page1 that builds personal portals. You can download it for free from Ziff-Davis (a computer publications firm) at http://www.pcmag.com/download. This program is documented in the November 17, 1998 issue of PC Magazine on page 255 and on the web page. It looks pretty good, but I won't discuss this option further in this column, lacking space.
Your third option, my favorite, is to build one from scratch. To bone up on basic HTML, hunt up my April 1998 Brain Candy. We'll be adding to the HTML I taught you there.
As is often the case, there's more than one way to do what we want to do. If you like to work from examples, I recommend you avoid looking at the Netscape bookmark file. Netscape uses HTML in a non-standard way in its bookmark file. Since we aren't supposed to be mucking about in the bookmark file, we can't fault them too much. Instead, use my links file at http://home.neo.rr.com/catbar/b_links/bar_link.htm. It uses HTML unnumbered lists; a much more standard way to present lists of links. Once you're there, use your browser's "View Source Page" function to look at the HTML code for the page. There's a fair amount going on here, but my DIY article covered most of what is being done. The most important tags which will be new to you are <UL>, <LI> and </UL>. The first and third tags are used to begin and end an unnumbered list and the <LI> tag is used to define a list entry. To make a short list of URLs to link to:
<UL>
<LI><a href="http://link1.htm">Link 1</a>
<LI><a href="http://link2.htm">Link 2</a>
<LI><a href="http://link3.htm">Link 3</a>
</UL>
You can get fancier by using nested lists (lists within lists), embedding graphics and by using a few other new tags. An important feature of a personal portal is a high-level index. You can link to a spot further down in your page by using the <A NAME=some_name> tag. It defines an internal reference point within the current web page for the <A HREF=#some_name> tag to jump to.
If you take the tags I've mentioned in my previous article and in this one and start to experiment, you may be surprised at what you'll come up with. HTML is a very safe language; you can't do any damage by making mistakes; at worst, you won't get what you want. Trial and error is a perfectly good way to learn the language.
If you want to know more about HTML, every web page you've ever looked at is an example. "View Page Source" is a great way to learn, especially if you're an example-based learner like I am. I hope you'll experiment freely!
CATBAR - Brain Candy 18 - Do-It-Yourself Portal / Brian Rock / December 4 1999