Hands-On: Creating a Webpage with Rotating Content

As you can see, it's possible to make good use of the Rotating Content scripts even if you do not have a webpage of your own. You can use the webspace provided by your course management software to share the Rotating Content with your students. The scripts will run in any area of Blackboard where HTML content is permitted.

For our next hands-on experiment, you will create a preview a webpage that contains a Rotating Content script. To do that, we will use Composer, a free web editing and publishing tool that is available as part of the Netscape browser suite and the Mozilla browser suite. I recommend the use of Composer because it is a free tool, which you and your students can use, both in a Windows environment or when working on a Macintosh. (As Mozilla phases out the Composer program, the great Nvu program will be taking its place.)

First, make sure you still have a browser window open with Laura's Rotating Content scripts. (If you closed that browser window already, open an Internet Explorer browser window, and type mythfolklore.net in the address bart, then click on the Calendar icon in the right-hand column.)

1. Open the Composer program. To do this, open the Netscape browser or Mozilla browser on your computer, and then go to the Windows menu and select Composer.

2. Type some text in the webpage window. You can type anything you want in the webpage window.

3. Copy the script you want to include. Just as you did before, go to the browser window which has the Rotating Content scripts website, and choose the script you want to use. Then highlight the script contained in the box and copy the script (using Control-C or Edit-Copy).

4. In HTML Source mode, add the script to your page. Now go back to the Composer screen, and click on the HTML Source option down at the very bottom of the screen. This will reveal the contents of your page in HTML code:

You can then paste the script into the page (using Control-V to paste, or Edit-Paste).

5. Save the page. Either click on the Save icon or choose File-Save and save the page. You will be prompted to give the page a "title" (this is not the name of the file, so you can use normal spaces, punctuation, capitalization, etc.)

Then save the file to the desktop with a name that contains no spaces or punctuation, using lower-case letters only.

6. View the page. In order to see what this webpage would look like when it is published on the Internet, click on the Browse icon in order to see the page displayed in a browser window.

You should see your page with the text you typed, together with the contents of the script you have selected. If you have selected a random content script, press the Refresh button in the browser to see new content displayed each time the page is reloaded.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Contact: laura-gibbs@ou.edu or visit mythfolklore.net. Last updated: July 22, 2005 1:06 PM