Creating Hot Links for Your Own Web Pages

by Meg Ropp for TE 402

Indexes

As part of your portfolio, you will want to create links to other resources on the World Wide Web. You can find sites on the Web which index other sites by subject or visit other homepages which contain lists of important links. A good place to start is the Yahoo! index which catalogues sites by subject. The URL for Yahoo! is http://www.yahoo.com/

Using Database Search Engines

Another way to find information is to run a search on a database like Alta Vista http://www.altavista.digital.com/
To use such a database, you must enter in keywords or phrases which will narrow down a search to a few good sites. For instance, if you are interested in finding sites which might be useful for a unit on American literature, you could run an Alta Vista search which might include the search terms "high school" +"John Steinbeck" +"literature" and see what you get. Links to different "search engines" like Alta Vista can be found at the Netscape HomePage (http://home.netscape.com/) and they will each have different ways to enter keywords.

Creating and Using Bookmarks

Once you have visited a valuable site and you would like to "save" it for future reference or to create links to it from your own pages, you can use Netscape's bookmark feature. If you are viewing the site, select "Add Bookmark" from the "Bookmarks" menu at the top of the Netscape window and a bookmark will be added to the bottom of the bookmark popdown menu. Once you have added a bookmark or several, you can copy them to a floppy disk that you have inserted. In the Netscape menu bar, select "Bookmarks" from the popdown menu under the "Window" menu. You will see several bookmarks which were already on your machine and then the ones that you have added last. Scroll down to the bookmark you want to copy to your disk and click and hold down the mouse as you drag it to your disk. A single Netscape file should appear on your disk.

Now the next time you bring your disk to the lab, all you have to do is double-click on your Netscape file and Netscape will open a new connection to the location of your bookmark.

If you want to use your bookmarks to create hotlinks in an HTML document your are working on, one way to do this is to drag your bookmarks to an open document file window. I did this in the following example using a blank SimpleText document and I am not sure how it would work using other applications.

In this manner, you can quickly have a list of URL's in a SimpleText document which are then ready to copy and paste into an HTML document using and editor or entering individual tags.