Learning the Internet

Mike Carey (St. Eunan's, Letterkenny) developed his own website. He shared the experience of setting up his own website by writing a number of articles explaining how he went about it. We reproduce the articles here as a set of lessons.
Lesson I: Getting Started
Lesson II: Building a Webpage
Lesson III: Adding Cool touches to your page and Cool Sites
Lesson IV: Search Engines and earning money on the internet
Chataway: Petra Madill (Transition year), Holy Child Community School, Sallynoggin, discusses Chatrooms.

Lesson I

Hi everybody. I'm Mike and I first got involved in the Internet about 2 years ago and I was totally shocked when I saw the amount of information on it! Absolutely everything was there. For example I wanted to look up a Simpson's site and when I did, I got almost 53,167 pages on it, and that was just the Altavista search engine! Then I got it in my house in March and one of the first things I did was get a website on a free homepage provider. If you want to get a www.yourhomepagename.com site then you have to pay a small fee but you will get more visitors. I started with Expage.com and I would advise you to do this as well, as that is probably the easiest homepage provider for beginners. Some other free homepage providers are: Gurlpages, Yahoo, Geocities, Angelfire and lots more!

I started with a poll on my page and I got a huge response to that. Then I decided to go a bit further by surfing around the net looking for HTML codes and Java, etc. Once I got that I was flying. By this stage I had a chatroom and midi's (songs) on it. I then had to open a job page because I couldn't manage the site myself, so now I also have a Vice President, an advertiser, an editor, 3 chat monitors, a page layout producer, and a mailinglist supervisor. Now that I had my site up and running I had to make sure my visitors enjoyed my site so I got the best stuff I could find including graphics and awards. Now, I have an average of 100 visitors to my site each day (which is good for a freesite) and my visitor counter marks 1320.

Some Internet terms explained:
g2g = got to go
u = you
oic = oh I see
lol = laughing out loud
snail mail = If you have the Internet then normal mail ( you know, with an envelope and stamp ) is referred to as ''snail mail''
www = World Wide Web
IM = Instant Messenger

After my website I moved onto Onelist.com, a world-wide free mailinglist provider. There you can join and create your own mailinglist. I joined a mailinglist for true friends but I had to unsubscribe because I was getting an amazing number of emails a day and it ate up my whole day reading them. So then I decided to create my own one called postcards4u and that was about people from around the world swapping postcards. That was all well until I got an average of 10 postcards through my ''snail mail'' mailbox every day, so I had to go and buy postcards and stamps to send to these foreign countries! After all that I decided to make a mailing list for teens by teens and that is where I am today. We talk about all teen-related topics.

Freestuff sites: If you are very bored then nip over to some freestuff sites. On these sites you can order demo CDs, mouse mats, catalogues, pictures, etc. But sometimes (a lot of the time) you have to pay for p&p (postage and packaging) or it is U.S. Residents Only.

Downloads: You can download games, fonts, print-outs, etc. They can be fun but viruses can carry which can have disastrous effects.

Lesson II

Htoo Twins

Asgard

Napster

Learning the Internet

Features Links

Lesson I