Net Gains: August 13, 1998 - one of Lyndon Cerejo's published articles

There are two kinds of Web experiences - active participant and passive observer. When a newbie (Internet term for a new user) logs on, he surfs around the Web, exploring and looking at what is already available on the World Wide Web - either finding sites and pages from web directories like Yahoo! or via columns like this which feature interesting and useful sites every week. That is what site-seeing is all about, and is a passive web experience. Nothing wrong with that; there's a wealth of information out there, right from research documents and online books to news and general timepass pages. According to the April issue of Science Mag, there were at least 320 million web pages on the World Wide Web. Chances are there are millions more, since there is no way anyone can keep track of the number of web pages on the WWW.

The active participant, on the other hand, not only surfs like the passive observer, but also contributes to building the World Wide Web. The best thing about the WWW is that it gives everyone a chance to contribute, a chance to make his mark on the Web - by creating his own homepage.

The most common type of homepages are personal homepages - webpages people create about themselves, their likes, dislikes, or maybe some issue that matters to them. Students going abroad create personal homepages with a little bit about themselves, their academic careers, and resumes, so that professors abroad can find out more before deciding which students to give aid to. Housewives create personal homepages to share their recipes with the rest of the world, while new mothers can create personal homepages as an online diary to keep track of the various firsts of the new-born. Research students can create personal homepages that share their research findings with the rest of the world - and someone even in Tanzania or Finland can benefit from this research. Families can put up family pages to keep other family members in other parts of the country or world informed about the latest happenings, and share the latest family photographs. Our Bollywood star Shammi Kapoor spends a lot of time creating webpages to showcase his family history…

While earlier, web pages could only be put up with people who had their own servers, today everyone and his girlfriend can have their own homepages up - for a price that's very attractive - FREE! There are companies that give out space on the Web for free, to encourage people to build their own pages, but homepage building was largely restricted to those who knew HTML (language web pages are written in). The other problem was that most of these services catered exclusively to people from the US. Not any longer.

Rediff Personal Homepages (http://members.rediff.com) offers everyone a chance to build his own free homepage - the only qualification being that the person has to know how to type and use a mouse - no need of learning how to create pages, nothing! It's as simple as that. They have templates that people who register (for free) can use to build their pages within minutes. I created mine within five minutes - take a look at it at http://members.rediff.com/lycerejo. Those who would rather use their own HTML can upload their own files onto the Web too. And if you would like to put a snap of yours on the Net, they offer a free scanning facility for members to have their pictures scanned and put on the Net. When you've created your page, you can easily tell your friends about your new home on the WWW.

Thanks to today's technology, creating a webpage is literally child's play. Try your hand at it - and you'll soon have a permanent home on the Net!

	Net Gains (Aug 13, 98)
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