Publishing

Clean Your Code

Section 1 - Introduction
Section 2 - Basics
Section 3 - Next Level
Section 4 - Advanced
Section 5 - Publishing
      Local directory
      Clean your code
      Web Hosts
      Uploading files
      You try it
Section 6 - Extras
Appendices

In the last lesson an example was given of a link that works on the local computer, but not on the Internet. That is an example of messy coding. The opposite of messed-up coding is clean coding. There are a couple tips in this lesson on how to make sure your code is clean.

The first recommendation is to make sure that none of your links connect to your local drive. Then, proof read your document. Typos happen, but minimize them through a careful read-through. If you aren't good at spelling, copy your text into a word-processing program (like Microsoft Word) and spell-check it.

Once you get your pages online, check every single link to make sure they work. It takes a little bit of time, but it's important to make your page as professional as possible. Be sure to note that you should check external links often, as sometimes people change web addresses for no good reason.

Other more common problems include ghost tags, or little < or > signs floating in your text. Proofreading usually helps you spot them. A tricker problem you may face is missing text. In this case, not everything you type shows up on your page. Usually this is caused by an open tag. Let me show you:

<a href="#bob" target="_blank">This link</a is very important. You can see that I have a lot of text here. This should show up, but it doesn't. Can you see why? And here is another <a href="#cat">link</a>. Can you see why this doesn't work?

And you see:

This link link. Can you see why this doesn't work?

Anyway, these are some tips to make your pages better. Next, you learn about the hosts who will babysit your site.