Home page

[Ron Berry]

A home page is for the World Wide Web and is the next step in this type of
electronic communication.  It allows pictures to be embeded in the documents
and best of all it allows hypertext links.  Hypertext is sections of the
text that are marked ( usually in blue) so that you can click on them and be
connected to somewhere else.  For example:  My sons were looking for
pictures of the band Nirvana.  They started Netscape which is a browser for
the WWW.  They went to Yahoo which is an index area that has a list of
topics like:
        Arts
        Education
        Government
etc.

They click on arts and that connects them to another computer that has a
list of Arts pages.  They click on music and get a big page with with all
sorts of bands.  Once they find Nirvana they click on that and go to a
Nirvana Home Page.  This has pictures of the band and links to download
large pictures.  They can click to download samples of their songs in a .wav
file format. (These are big downloads)

I can forsee PTG having such a page with a link for a list of RPTs.  Once
you get that you get a list of clickable states and find yours.  You then
get a list of RPTs and their phone numbers.  There can be a link for
technical info which would get you the Brochures and bulletins that we have
now.  I'm thinking so far of customers searching this page.  We could have
back issues of Journals available but that would be a big project although
we have someone working on that now.  That resource might be better
distributed on disk than online.  I could forsee links to piano
manufacturers that have home pages. The beauty of this system is that you
can add a whole category of information to you page by just putting a
pointer to someone else's page that it already set up.  There would be links
to music resource pages which already exist.

The WWW and browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape allow you to point and
click your way through the internet.  Home pages can deal with text,
pictures, sound, video, can access gophers, ftp sites, and e-mail.  They can
even have forms for user input to search databases.  This project would take
some doing.  It is easier now that I found an add on for Microsoft word to
write hypertext pages.  The PTG Board has concerns about how much and what
information we put out to the world.  Many of them don't understand what
this sort of communication is about, so there is some education to do.

  You have to have full internet connection and a browser such as Mosaic or
Netscape both of which are available on the net for free.  Even a 14400
modem is a bit slow for pages with many graphics.

I apologize for the long winded description.  Start reading PC magazine or
any such magazine and almost every issue will have something about WWW.

Ron

Ron Berry
ronberry@iquest.net

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