If you would like, I can send this document to you as an E-mail message. Just send E-mail to me at: vodhner@aztec.asu.edu. The following is my "Frequently Asked Questions" document (or "FAQ" in Internet jargon). If you have any questions or need me to clarify anything, please don't hesitate to write back. I'll be happy to help you in any way that is needed, but you need to come up with the material. I look forward to hearing from you. Best regards - - Victor Odhner, Phoenix AZ Life's a Miracle ... http://www.primenet.com/~vodhner And Then you Live Forever. ------------------------------------------------------------------ How to get Your House of Worship on AzTeC and the World Wide Web. The hardest part of this process is just to DO IT. All we need from you is some text, and I stand ready to help you get it formatted and installed. I'm here to make it as easy for you as possible. Please send me mail if you need me to explain anything further. Frequently Asked Questions: HOW? Send it to me as an E-mail message, either in fully marked-up HTML form or just as a text file which I can mark up for you. Or, if you can prepare it and make it visible elsewhere on the Web, I can transfer it via my web browser. If you can put it in an anonymous-FTP area, I can pull it via FTP. And there's always the diskette approach if none of these work for you! But if this sounds complicated, just type your "pamphlet" into an E-mail message to me (or several messages for me to piece together), and I'll do the rest! I received one excellent page this way, and installed it within two days. For more technical information about how all this works, see a section near the bottom: WHERE CAN I GET MORE INFORMATION? HOW BIG? A really substantial page would be about 20k bytes (20,000 characters), or 30 pages, or 600 lines. Our biggest so far is almost 200k bytes (pictures take a lot of space). Our primary goal is to present information people can use, and a picture is not always worth 1000 words; but size is not a likely problem. COST? AzTeC is a donated/volunteer service. Any support, financial or volunteer, is welcome. But there is no charge for your house of worship, or other community organization, to have a web page. Your page would be an enhancement to AzTeC's community-info mission, so we would be grateful to have it. VISIBLE WORLDWIDE? Definitely. Anybody on the Internet can reach your page at "http://aztec.asu.edu/worship/your-name-here/". This type of address is a "URL" (Uniform Resource Locator). For example, the URL for Sunrise Chapel in Tucson is: http://aztec.asu.edu/worship/sunrise/ When the page is installed, you'll be able to publish your URL. (Be thinking of the short word or abbreviation you would use as the last part of that address -- shorter is better.) You should put this with your phone numbers and other contact information, along with your E-mail address for contacts, in your organization's newsletter if you have one. You might even put it in fine print at the bottom of one of the signs outside your building! When you show it in publications or on signs, it's understandable to most "net-aware" people if you say it like this: On the World Wide Web: http://aztec.asu.edu/worship/sunrise/ CAN PEOPLE TALK BACK? Only if you give them your E-mail address. I will place your E-mail address at the bottom of your page. If a visitor "clicks" or presses Enter when their cursor is positioned over this address, they will be asked to type a message to you. So, you may receive E-mail from someone who is viewing your page. Since they have to manually enter their own E-mail address, and since the form for entry of the message is awkward, you may occasionally receive a scrambled or un-traceable message. "Empty" messages will most often be caused by someone clicking on your E-mail address by mistake and not knowing how to avoid sending a message -- it's probably NOT someone trying to heckle you! If they have much to say, hopefully they will note your address and use a more effective method (their favorite mail program) to communicate with you. Some web pages allow visitors to fill in a form, for example to order commercial products. AzTeC supports only a simple example of this, for sending E-mail as described above. You'd have to pay (a lot of) money to a commercial Internet provider to have a fully interactive web page. RESTRICTIONS? Your page must be a substantial piece of stuff on AzTeC, not just a pointer or bunch of pointers to other sites on the web. The first two screenfuls of any existing House Of Worship page should give you the idea. You are also welcome to add external links to your page. (There are the usual constraints of decency, etc., but your standards will presumably be high enough that this isn't an issue.) Finally, you incur the obligation to keep it up to date. WE ALREADY HAVE A WEB PAGE ON ANOTHER SITE. We are happy to add links to the House of Worship menu at http://aztec.asu.edu/worship/ pointing to pages for Houses of Worship on other sites. You'll find some of these in place now. We also have pointers to some home pages of parent organizations, which in turn show Houses of Worship in our Arizona community. The pages should be reasonably Lynx-friendly. I'm happy to discuss this with you; just send me the address of your page. WILL WE BE ABLE TO UPDATE OUR PAGE? If you request it, I'll send back to you a copy of the "raw" marked-up text for your page, as an E-mail message. You can save the message to your work area and then download it to your personal computer. If you have an account elsewhere than at AzTeC, you can also grab a copy of any Here are examples for two browsers: Lynx: Press \ to see the page in marked-up form; then, Press P for "print", and select "Save as Disk File". The file will be saved on your host system and you can download it from there. (AzTeC's version of Lynx does not permit you to save any files.) Netscape: File / Save As ... set document's "type" as "source". When you wish to update your page -- you'll want to keep your schedule and other information fresh -- just work the changes into the marked-up text, and ship it back to me -- or if you have a web area elsewhere you can put it there and I'll fetch it with my browser. For really simple updates you can just tell me what to change, but make sure the context is clearly explained: Change (person)'s title, change time of (event), add (new event) after/in place of (existing event). You don't have to understand the markup language, though some of it will be intuitive. But it will guarantee that your updates will be in the proper context. I'll do any necessary review and/or cleanup when you send an update. WHERE SHOULD I START? You can use an existing House of Worship page. Also, use material from your Welcome pamphlet if you have one; or an invitation-to-worship poster you might stick up on a bulletin board. Of course your web page can contain much more information than most pamphlets. The section on UPDATES, above, describes how you can download any web page to your personal computer. If you have any problem doing this, I'm here to help you. CAN WE HAVE GRAPHICS? You may wish to include photos or designs in your Web Page. Those logging into AzTeC can only use the text-oriented "Lynx"" browser, so the page must be presentable in text-only mode. But many people view the AzTeC pages over the Internet using graphical browsers, and *optional* graphics are welcome. Please avoid large and unavoidable in-line graphics which can slow down the viewing of a page. WHERE CAN I GET MORE INFORMATION? There is another document about the AzTeC Freenet, and about the House of Worship, at: http://www.primenet.com/~vodhner/aztecweb.txt Send me a message and I'll E-mail a copy to you, if you don't know how to view web pages. PROCEDURE? Just do it. Any questions, ask me; else just dump the text on me. I will do what's needed to make it ready for AzTeC, and then I'll give you an opportunity to review it before I make it visible to the rest of the world. We'd love to have your material online. Just send me some text and we'll be on the way. Thank you! Victor Odhner vodhner@aztec.asu.edu