Getting Tonga on the 'NET live

Just in case someone wants to follow fallen ways, here's part of the route to bringing www.tongatapu.net.to to you.

The Web Server on the Internet is provided courtesy of Tonic.To the people who bring you the spunkiest automated Domain Name registration/maintenance service. So please, buy up a lot of .TO domain names and give these guys heaps of money so they can keep this website up and running. Apart from their great service, they are also nice guys.

Web Servers

For a personal web server that you can run on your own machine and test your web pages try out O'Reilly & Associate's WebSite(tm) 1.0c software which has an easy user interface for setting up and running a functional web server without having to crack manuals open. Once you've geared yourself a little with website try upgrading to a different Windows server such as Microsoft's Personal Web Server or Internet Information Server. For a unix experience, install and configure Apache which runs well on standard PCs and Linux.

These pages are published on 2 LANs running NT Server and IIS 3.0 (upgrading to 4.0 sometime soon) with a hopeful Apache web server in the near future as well as a testing facility. The Internet publication is through an Apache server. There are differences between how the different servers behave which continues to be causes for errors (on top of the human factor.)

HTML Editors

Learning how to read/write HTML is a pain for beginners, but eventually necessary to create visually pleasurable sites (in no way implying that any of this has been achieved).

In the meantime, Microsoft's Word Assistant is one of the most comprehensive Freeware html what you see is what you almost get (WYSIWYAG) converters/authors. After a number of hours fiddling with Word's converted HTML files, and touching them up with Notepad or some other text editor then an appreciation can be made for HTML editors such as HomeSite

I have tried WYSIWYG editors such as Frontpage which has significantly better design features than my meandering hacking, but for what I want Homesite 3.0 is the preferred HTML editor.

Hardware Resources

PCs with ranging power have been used in the production development of these pages. Machines have ranged from a clumsy 80486dx 33Mhz to a Pentium Pro 200. The faster the machine, the more fun (and the more things you can have up and running) but a comfortable work environment for building web pages can be had with an 80486dx 33Mhz with at least 16MB Ram and a fast hard disk.

Although we're not getting rich doing this work, we like the advise to test the pages on as broad an environment as cost effectively possible. Pre-release files are viewed in at least four web clients/browsers and at least three operating systems. Web viewing tests are performed with IE and Navigator for which these pages are targetted, while Mosaic and NetManage WebSurfer are used to check out problems without frames. Windows 95 rev b, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 sp3, Linux RHS 5.1 are used for clientside and serverside testing.