Text and hypertext can be presented quite dramatically via Netscape, but it's images that people find really eye-catching when they first encounter graphic browsers for the WWW. As the Web matures the use of images will probably become more sophisticated, and as access speed improves at W&L (when the T1 line arrives) it will be less frustrating to retrieve image-heavy pages from remote sites.

Images are scanned, (i.e., digitized and saved as certain kinds of files). The essential (at least for the moment) for images is that they must be saved in the .gif format (though Netscape can handle jpeg images as well). At the moment W&L's scanning and image editing facilities are pretty limited, but by September the paths to turning your images into .gif files will probably be clearer and less beset by demons.

Here are a couple of preposterous images from the Sharper Image Online Catalog's Father's Day Gift Ideas page.

And here's a nice Virginia map:

You can grab these or any other images you find on WWW pages and save them on your local machine --and then transfer them to Liberty and put them onto your own page(s) if you want to. The process is a bit complicated, but here's a summary of the steps:

  1. When you've found an image you'd like to grab, point the cursor somewhere in it and You'll see a menu, one choice of which is "save this image". If you opt to save you'll have an opportunity to specify where the image should be saved on your machine (e.g., on the desktop, in a folder, to a floppy disk).
  2. Once the image is saved on the local machine it will need to be transferred to Liberty (to your public_html subdirectory, for choice) in order to be accessible to Netscape. You'll have to use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to accomplish this feat: Both Fetch and FTP Access give you the opportunity to open a connection to a remote computer. For our purposes here the 'remote' computer is Liberty, so you need to type
    liberty.uc.wlu.edu
    under 'Host', and enter your Liberty username and then your Liberty password in the spaces provided. Fetch and FTP Access will go through the FTP login procedure and display Both Fetch and FTP Access do the work of transferring files for you once you've selected the file you want to move. To move from a local machine to Liberty:

    There is one VERY IMPORTANT thing to remember if you use either of these methods to move a .gif file: you MUST do the transfer as BINARY or your image will be unreadable. If you are using Fetch, choose raw data as the option --the default value 'Mac Binary' will not work.

    Another bit of mumbo-jumbo once you've successfully moved the .gif file to Liberty: you need to check to see its permissions status:

    1. At the $, type ls -ila and you'll see the long form of your directory listing. What you're looking for is a field that looks like this:
                -rw-r--r--
          -rw-r-----
          -rw-r-----
    2. If your .gif file has -rw-r----- it means that you can read the file and write to it, but the world at large can't. You need to change these permissions to permit Netscape to find and display the .gif.
    3. At the $, type chmod 644 filename.gif (substituting your gif's filename as appropriate). An alternate method contributed by Dr. Tom Whaley may be more intuitive.
    4. At the $ type ls -ila again and you'll see that your .gif now says -rw-r--r--, indicating that it's readable by the world at large.
      So we've covered
      • grabbing images
      • FTPing images to Liberty
      • checking and changing read permission
      Now what's necessary is the HTML to include an image in a document. It looks (in the basic form) like this:
      <IMG SRC="filename.gif">
      There are possibilities for alignment and other presentational niceties, but that's the essential form of the HTML tagging for an image.