Slashdot Mirror
Web Publishing Tools for Kids?
fuzbuh asks: "I want to help an 11 year old who wants to publish a site for kids, and am thinking about what tool(s) to provide for her. Her experience is limited to email, web browsing (on kid sites), and computer games. This, as a first step for her, needs to be easy, and more focused on content than form. What do people suggest for tools for her? A web based page builder (which one)? A WYSIWYG editor (may be a bit complex). A 'Wiki' where only she can edit? Maybe I should just start her with a blog to post her ideas and stories. What have others done? Any ideas and/or suggestions? Thanks in advance!"
It's good for kids to be allowed to explore and learn on their own but I think giving them a step up (into using a simple editor) and then allowing the child to explore on his or her own, has added benefits of requiring a bit more thought.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
Why exactly would an 11 year old need a website?? There are too many useless sites out there proclaiming 'I can built a website, I'm so cool!! Look at this picture of my hideous rat-dog!!!11!! k-thx-bye!!'
Teach her something worthwhile, like rebuilding small engines, or have her pick up a sport. Don't introduce her to blogging, I shudder at the thought of yet another blog.
One future, two choices. Oppose them or let them destroy us.
There's no reason an 11 year old can't learn to write standards compliant HTML or XHTML. It's not a complicated language. Just make sure to show her how to validate her pages.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I would suggest you check out Coffeecup Html Editor.
Lots of features, yet easy for beginners, oh and it has a "Live Chat feature", which may be much for an 11 year old, but maybe mommy can help?
I hate programs that write crappy pages for you. I have the opinion that if everybody who wanted to create a webpage simply learned a little html before doing so, the web would be a better place. It doesn't have to be flashy - just learn the basics, like body, table, font, p, br, etc. A little knowledge goes a long way. I'm sure even an 11 yr old could understand basic concepts like those, probably even quicker than most adults. You could "borrow" a page layout from some other site, and set up templates for them to edit. It could fun, while at the same time I don't think it hurts to challenge a kid.
When I was 11 I was already familiar with many WYSIWYG editors. I had moved on to doing HTML and Javascript coding. I knew some basic C. I had taught it all to myself because I was interested in it.
If I had only been interested in the content then I probably would have been satisfied with a WYSIWYG editor.
So figure out what her interest(s) is/are. If she wanted to know how to do web development, then let her start poking at teach yourself HTML guides online while she plays with some WYSIWYG editor. If she is only interested in publishing, however, then have her start planning what she would like her site to look like, have her start writing the meat of what will be on the site, and then teach her the basics of a WYSIWYG editor.
If she wants to have embedded blogs, then it's time to at least teach her the basics of the web and of HTML, PHP, Perl, or whatever else might be included in the blog software.
Sorry I can't give you a better answer. I can only say, "it depends on her interests."
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
I, for one, am planning on being very unhelpful. so fuck you.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
That is, 8 years ago, I had my own website. I taught myself basic HTML and wrote it up in Notepad. So did all my friends, as we had all just gotten our netconnections for the first time and were quite excited about it. I had a Star Wars page. This was long enough ago that Theforce.net didn't really exist yet, and it was still possible for me to get into the upper listings at Altavista.
Anyway, no reason that can't still be done. Best way to learn about such basics as HTML, UNIX, and FTP. Just give them a UNIX account with a few privileges -- that's what my ISP gave me back in the day.
I learned HTML at 6,
It opened me to a whole new world for me,
HTML led to Javascript led to PHP led to C (now at 15)
Give her the basics of HTML, and she'll do wonders. --Joel
and built my web site using good old plain vi.
It was a great learning experience but I quickly moved onto Perl and Postgresql.
fogcreek has a nice app called CityDesk. It's very easy to use. You can create a template for her and when she graduates to learning html, she can write her own. The personal edition is free. Windows only.
Stupid things kids do.
The real question here is: how comfortable are you with the technology you're introducing to this child? Can you stay far enough ahead of a young inquisitive mind to stear her in the right direction? If she suddenly wants to know all about cascading style sheets are you going to freek? Do PHP and SQL cause you to loose sleep at night?
If you're totally comfortable in this arena, then, by all means, introduce her to the nuts and bolts of web programming. If not, then point her in the direction of one of the "free" page hosts that provide a template driven page layout program.
Education, in any field of endevor, is simply a matter of providing a safe environment in which the recources exist for discovering on their own what you wanted the student to learn in the first place.
I will most likely get modded down to the basement for posting this but what about Frontpage.
You get it for free (well you get Express for free) and its so easy to use even a kid could figure it out. I do not think we should expect a little kids website to be perfectly valid HTML. Using Frontpage will make sure its not....
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*This is the cute bunny virus, please copy this into your sig so it can spread
Word save as html.
//e in Basic (not well mind you) html shouldn't be too difficult for an 11 year old.
Netscape Composer (sub Mozilla).
A quick walk through on this html help site
If I could program on my Apple
My daughter has been using dreamweaver for over a year to maintain her personal website.
She is even using templates to give the whole site a uniform look and feel.
Does she ask questions whenever she wants to do something new or different? Yup.
Do I think dreamweaver is too complicated for an 11 year old.
Send her here. Really. I taught myself HTML in my spare moments during a weekend using a much worse tutorial than that, and I was in college at the time. Kids learn faster. In three hours she'll have the HTML figured out and be looking for clip-art.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Okay. An eleven-year old girl probably uses AOL.
AOL has a built-in webpage builder. Use it. It will work fine for any simple website which an 11 year old would want to make.
I used its first incarnation many years ago. It was a great introduction to webpage design. Since then, I have learned HTML and C++, and am in the process of learning PHP.
Also through AOL's homepage builder, I learned that no matter what the method is, creating a decent website takes a lot more work than is outwardly apparent (It's all in the CONTENT). If content is what you need, than the easiest way to build a website is through a relatively simple tool like AOL's homepage builder. In fact, I'd say that languages such as php are actually not conducive to promiting the use of good content.
It amazes me how ignorant and arrogant some slashdot readers are. Seriously, do you really think that she's going to want to learn HTML for her first website?
Why does the tool she uses have to be open-source? If AOL's homepage builder was absolutely useless, it wouldn't exist. Everything serves a function.
Now, personally, I wouldn't be caught dead using AOL's homepage builder, but it's a great start. Look at the logical progression of how I evolved my web-design skills:
1) Used AOL's homepage builder to create a simple one-page website. (It was quite limited at the time, couldn't make images into hyperlinks, no tables, etc.)
2) Used Netscape GOLD with it's intergrated WYSIWIG HTML editor to add tables to my page. (ooooohhh, aaahhhh)
3) Switched to MS Word's 'save as HTML' function. It's easy, and most computers have word installed on them
4) Started using Frontpage. Welcome to the world of multi-page sites!
5) Learned to write HTML on my own
6) Switched from frontpage to dreamweaver. Started drawing up concept sketches of what the site should look like in photoshop. Starting to dabble in ASP and PHP.
Now, this is quite a long progression, and most people won't follow the same path. But my point is that everybody should learn their own path.
Don't set up a system where you are in complete control. Give her the tools she needs to create the website, and let her explore on her own. If she needs help, let her ask questions.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I'd say it depends on what sort of website she wants, what sort of content she intends to put on it.
For lots of regularly-updated stuff, a blog is good.
For mainly text-based stuff that isn't blog-like, Wiki software is good. Text-based HTML editors are also reasonable: if you only use simple tags, (like I'm doing in this post), HTML is easy to learn. You might want to help her set up CSS to make it look pretty.
I don't have much experience with WYSIWYG web-building tools, so I won't comment on the.
You want her to get this job, right? :)
Fellowship 9/11
It amazes me how ignorant and arrogant some slashdot readers are. Seriously, do you really think that she's going to want to learn HTML for her first website? I did. Well, sort of. I started with basic text-formatting HTML at 12 and by 13 and 14 worked up to basic webpages and framesets. By 15 I was up to tables. What I'm saying is, don't underestimate the girl. If I could have found an easy-to-understand tutorial on HTML, I would have used it for my first page (And by easy-to-understand, I mean easy to understand for someone with a college reading level). But I didn't find that until I was 14. So I had to make due. But this girl, she doesn't necessarily have to. With sites like HTML Goodies, she doesn't have to resort to an editor if she really wants to learn to code. For the record, I started with the gURLpages Basic Editor, moved up to the gURLpages advanced editor, then the angelfire advanced editor, and finally notepad. I do use Word or Geocities Pagebuilder if I'm in a hurry or feeling lazy though. But anyway, give this kid some credit.
Why exactly does a geek NEED a reply option? There are too many chunks of flamebait out there proclaiming "I can be elitist! Look at me make fun of other people! Hahaha, you suck!"
Give him something worthwhile, like some contact with other, nonhostile humans, or have him talk to some kids who aren't just spoiled little brats with high IQs.
***
And, in response to your post a bit deeper into the thread...
***
A geeky troll has absolutely no knowledge of any value to share. He should not even be allowed to use a site as socially oriented as Slashdot, just like he should be prevented by law from procreating.
Let him play with his computers, and don't try to make him grow up like he should have some years ago. Social lives are for people, not elitist bastards. These lessons of tolerance and humility, they can be better taught through counseling. Slashdot only exacerbates the problem and becomes a significant waste of my time, patience, and emotional investment.
A good as in free wysiwyg html editor is Mozilla Composer, which comes with Mozilla. It includes ftp support.
A good free standalone ftp client is FileZilla.
Beyond that, all you need is a good image editor. I believe Paint Shop Pro 5.0 doesn't enforce the 60 day trial limit like 6.0 through 8.0. There's also the gimp, a free, but powerful open source image editor, but the windows version is always more buggy and less up to date than the linux version.
My experience with Tiki-Wiki is limited to installing it and getting it to work with MySQL. I haven't actually "used" it. But it appears to have a lot of features. The download contains thousands of files.
It's an excellent product, already at 2.0, with much thought put into ease of use and user experience. It has a personal edition which is free, and the full edition is cheap. Definitely better than Wikis (they usually are a mess for non-technical users). Maybe an account at Blogspot or TextAmerica would be even simpler, but a blog is not a website... you decide what you need.
the first 'language' (yes, i know, not a real programming language per se) that I learned whatn i was right around that age was HTML, it introduces the logic process common to programming, and once she has HTML down, CSS, and PHP is easy to add in. PHP of course paves the way for the bigger languages. HTML is VERY visual which helps the first time learner (especially a child).
:) OK, mabye not, but
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HER! show her HTML now, and she'll be outdoing you in C+ database apps at 16
HTML->PHP->MySQL->[insert DB here]
|->Perl->BASH
|->C+
Besides, the more X chromosomes we have in the geek gene pool, the better, we need more people like that, makes fewer ignorant people in the world.
Logistical Chaos Officer http://www.slagg.org - LAN Gaming in Sarasota FL,USA
It is crap but this is an 11 year old. In word she wouldn't have to know html at all.
A lady I work with does webpages for various church organizations, hospitals, etc. and she uses Publisher. The html is insane. What is done in 5-6 pages worth of html can be done with a table and two rows! lol. It also converts 1/2 the text to transparent gif images!!! Lol. Nightmare.
I see some folks on here have mentioned Dreamweaver. I don't think I would want to purchase something when I could do it for free and keep the content free, and I want to teach my children the same. I also don't like the whole product activation thing.
My 8 year old boy has started doing his own site using Mozilla Composer. There are some tools on the web, counters and such, that generate HTML code and he's learned to cut and paste that code into his document. When he does he reads the code and tries to understand it, asking questions along the way.
There are plenty of ways to create web content, kids can use any of them. They will suprise you and you might even learn something from their work.
Note that we don't have a Windows based system anywhere in the house. Imagine a child, probing his/her way around the computer in the learning process. Tried that, got tired of fixing broken computers because the kids had screwed something up. My kids, 8 and 6, learn on their own Linux computer. I've had to do less sysadmin stuff to that box than most of the machines at work. They experiment along, lots of trial and error and theres no big panic when they screw something up. Both boys find themselves at home now on Solaris and FreeBSD machines too.
So let the kid use the same tools you would use.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Might I suggest that you locate a site that offers simple templates? Now - before everyone gets spun up -
I am in no way a computer person - but my job is dragging me into the 6th circle of hell - the IT world. I located a 10 page template with a style sheet. I saved the original files and then made a set that I renamed. I borrowed a few html books and taught myself. I understand that there are even html books for kids - easier reading with the same end results!
Good luck!
Anyone can do any amount of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.
Mozilla has a built-in, basic WYSIWYG editor.
Have her use this for basic layout and content and then view source/experiment with the HTML using (free) HTML-Kit to get a grasp of what's going on.
I'd point her towards Webmonkey for Kids. They have some really neat stuff to get her started.
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/kids/
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I'm 13, and I've been programming interactive (PHP, mostly) web pages since I was 11. There's no reason yours can't do some basic HTML.
It's basically a browser that also acts as a wysiwyg editor. You can also see/edit the source of the page. It has a pretty decent parser for cleaning up the code, and it does a decent job of checking the syntax on simple HTML. All this, and it's free as in beer (though not as in speech).
Here's why not:
It's out of date abandon-ware. I don't know if it's legally obtainable, but many people (like this guy) still have copies of it sitting around on their websites for you to freely download.
Whatever you do, please don't judge it by my website. I have little to no talent when it comes to web design... but that will never stop me from trying.
Is she doing it because of the topic(s) she'll publish on the web, or is she a budding webmaster?
If she's more into the content of the website, rather than the website itself, go toward the less-technical side of things (without dumbing it down too much).
Above all, give here a good fundemental foundation! Code away!
I accidentally modded you down when I meant to mod you up as "insightful". I think my scrollwheel must have changed the option when I wasn't looking at it.
By posting in this topic my mistaken moderation should be undone.
http://www.kjsl.net/~cj/
For Christmas last year I got my (then 10 yo) son a domain name and a book on HTML. I set his Mac up with BBEdit and an FTP client, and after a couple days of reading and just a little bit of help from me, he had a site up and running.
7 64 560670/qid=1070420666/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/102-991522 3-5041741?v=glance&n=507846
It's pretty hard to navigate, and some of the HTML is questionable, but he had a lot of fun with it. I'm going to help him get set up with PostNuke soon, as he's kind of bored with writing HTML.
I'd like to post the URL for his site, but it's better if I omit it to protect his privacy. There are a lot of weirdos on the Internet, you know.
Anyway, I can't recommend this book enough:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
Have you heard about HotDog? Sausage.com HotDog series works out pretty well for me, especially when you just need to whip up something in a few minutes. PageWiz, the 2nd level, has WYSIWYG if you want to use it, but you can also use straight html.
I had my first website when I was nine. I had an HTML book, a few tutorial websites, and notepad.
HTML is really simple, especially at a young age. If you don't care about standards (I'm sure an 11 year old girl sure doesn't) then that is a great way to start. She can learn as much as she needs to do what she needs.
Plus, you're obviously involved somehow. You should be able to help her with the very basics.
hey!
Kids are much more capable than most people give them credit for.
Regards,
Patrick
I'm a Web Weaver fan (McWeb Software). It only costs around 20 for the standard and 25 for the plus, which I would recommend as you get the extras like JPerk. It's been around for a few years. You work in an HTML environment rather than a visual, HTML blind environment like FrontPage. But there is also Web WeaverEZ, which is for FREE and a great way to get started. It is frequently used in a school lab environment.
There's a great education site for teaching kids to write valid HTML here at Webmonkey.
Works for scared adults too.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
No kid knows C at 11. What parent is going to buy their kid a C compiler? And don't tell me that you downloaded and installed Linux, gcc, etc. at age 10. Oh wait, you (at least claim to) use Debian, so maybe you are as cool as your smugness indicates.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Unfortunately its not a complete commercial quality product, but I thought Denim would make an excelent program for kids to learn to make web pages. Its exceedingly simple and I think any child that can read could use it easily.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
- Publish a weblog
- Publish a photo album
- Maintain lists of your favorite books, music, weblogs, and links
- Personalize your site's colors, layout, and design
- Connect with others who share your interests
- Limit who reads your weblog through password protection
That should be everything an 11-year old girl needs, unless she has some interest in learning CS.My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)