Web Publishing Tools for Kids? 86
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!"
Time constraints? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:My question (Score:2)
Re:My question (Score:2)
What a bonehead! You either don't know any 11 year old girls or are afraid of women and think an 11 year old girl might be smarter than you.
Both my girls do a lot of their homework on the computer. Both girls are touch typists. Neither has yet built a web page, but in 7th grade IIRC their classes will build hypertext projects. It's part of the curriculum becau
Re:My question (Score:3, Funny)
My site also has pictures of my cat, thank-you-very-much!
Re:My question (Score:1)
"Judge not, lest ye be judged" (Score:2, Funny)
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.
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And, in response to your post a bit deeper into the thread...
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A geeky troll has absolutely no knowledge of any value to share. He should not even be allowed to u
Sorry flikx (off-topic) (Score:1)
By posting in this topic my mistaken moderation should be undone.
Standards compliant (x)HTML (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Standards compliant (x)HTML (Score:4, Insightful)
Want (or feel that she needs) WYSIWYG? Get a box of crayons. The world needs a bunch of things, but more gimp drag-n-drop web'masters isn't one of them.
No offense intended. Heck turn her loose with an HTML book and notepad - she may amaze you (11 year old children do that.)
Webmonkey For Kids (Score:2)
Works for scared adults too.
Re:Standards compliant (x)HTML (Score:1)
One other benefit of learning/using HTML: It's platform-agnostic. It translates equally well from the PC at her house to the Macs in her school.
D.
Re:Standards compliant (x)HTML (Score:1)
Coffeecup Html Editor (Score:3, Informative)
I would suggest you check out Coffeecup Html Editor [coffeecup.com].
Lots of features, yet easy for beginners, oh and it has a "Live Chat feature" [coffeecup.com], which may be much for an 11 year old, but maybe mommy can help?
Really.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy (Score:2)
Netscape Composer (sub Mozilla).
A quick walk through on this html help site [super.net.pk]
If I could program on my Apple
Re:Easy (Score:1)
Ouch, talk about crap HTML. If you do that, be sure to run it through the demoroniser. [fourmilab.ch]
true (Score:2)
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.
Re:true (Score:1)
Ahh, the "learned helplessness" approach.
Re:true (Score:1)
I knew HTML as an 11-year-old. It's not that hard. Maybe she shouldn't be doing all of her writing in it, but she should at least know the basics.
Re:Easy (Score:2)
Re:Really.... (Score:1)
Re:Really.... (Score:1)
Re:Really.... (Score:3, Informative)
Depends on what the kid's interest is. (Score:5, Interesting)
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."
Re:Depends on what the kid's interest is. (Score:2)
For what it's worth I concur with those who are suggesting that the kid be taught HTML before being let loose with a WYSIWYG editor. I was doing Z80 assembler by age 11 so I think it's safe to say that a children can learn a simple markup language like HTML. Especially as they'll have the joy of starting their HTML career with a largely standards comliant browser base.
Re:Depends on what the kid's interest is. (Score:2)
Eleven year-olds can do just about anything. My girlfriend has a nine year old in her calc class. That might be a little much... meaning there might be a physical beneficial abnormality helping him out. A friend of mine has a brother in the third grade who has can talk to be about base 2, 10, and 13, though.
Certainly you have to present the material in the right way, but I wou
I call bullshit (Score:2)
Re:I call bullshit (Score:2)
I didn't mean to be smug. I am sorry if I came off that way. I was simply trying to say that kids can do a lot. I didn't say I knew a lot of C, but I could write a program that could accept input and do something with it. (i.e. type in your name and password -- unencrypted.. or even hidden -- and it will say "hi username! glad to see you" or "sorry, wrong password" if it didn't match up. And no, I did not have the passwords stored in a database. It was a big "if" statement.
As for
discourage the use of "thanks in advance" (Score:1, Funny)
Re:discourage the use of "thanks in advance" (Score:1)
Re:discourage the use of "thanks in advance" (Score:2)
Given any points I woulda marked you +1: Insightful.
When I was 11... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:When I was 11... (Score:2)
Remind me again why a kid needs to learn UNIX to publish a home page? Even HTML is debatable as WYSIWYG editors are quite adequate for everything she might need to create.
Re:When I was 11... (Score:2)
Re:When I was 11... (Score:2)
So in an *nix system I can't use FTP to upload files where I actually want them? At least that's how I did it with my ISP assigned web space...
Re:When I was 11... (Score:1)
No. It's not.
There have been times I have written school reports, essays, etc. because I need to use images and Word does a horrible job of handling images on a slow system. All my pages are plain XHTML with lots of CSS added on. And god help you if you have Internet Explorer--don't even think about telling me what I did wrong...
Meh.
Not knowing HTML makes it really hard to make a good site. Teaching CS
when I was four I learned HTML.. (Score:4, Funny)
It was a great learning experience but I quickly moved onto Perl and Postgresql.
Citydesk from fogcreek (Score:2, Informative)
Helping an 11 yr old. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Frontpage (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
Re:Frontpage (Score:1)
Re:Frontpage (Score:2)
I was going to make the same suggestion. Frontpage or Dreamweaver would be an excellent choice for focussing on content over form. The poster could set up the tool such that it edits on the live site, eliminating extra steps of publishing for the kid. As a service to the kid the danger of screwing things up could be minimalized if the poster would remotely back the site up once in a while in order to have a recent version to restore if necessary.
How the rest of the posters have such small brains that t
Re:Frontpage (Score:2)
I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.
I'm curious if fuzbuh is planning to let his/her 11 year old post just anything to the web site, or will fuzbuh screen the content first? I'm interested in this topic because my seven year old wants his own web page (he's so damn creative I can't wait to see it), and I plan to build it with him, starting Christmas break. My plan is to build a web site locally, the
Re:Frontpage (Score:1)
Why not? I'm serious, I can't think of a reason why it would be bad or dangerous for a kid to post their own content to the web. I'm not a parent, though, so maybe I'm missing something.
Re:Frontpage (Score:2)
They post private information about themselves, e-mail address, AIM username, that kind of thing. Somehow, it falls into the hands of a paedophile who uses the info to get a headstart on grooming the kid (they probably will already know about the kids hobbies etc. from reading the site).
They may post stuff that is defametory and/or libellous. They don't like/get bullied by a kid at school, so call him a poopyhead - parent of said child reads it, ISP gets notified and not only remo
I have an 11 year old, she uses dreamweaver (Score:2)
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.
Re:I have an 11 year old, she uses dreamweaver (Score:1)
There is a new program here in Georgia called Promote [promotega.org] that has groups of kids as young as 3rd grade creating instructional webpages. I've also seen Adobe GoLive and Frontpage used by these kids to do some amazing things. You would be amazed at what some of these youngins are capable of.
P
w3schools. (Score:2, Insightful)
the answer is quite simple (Score:2)
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 (
Re:the answer is quite simple (Score:1)
One can create great websites with a tiny sub-set of (X)HTML. Is it really too difficult to learn 10 elements? I could teach this to any kid in less than an hour. If you want to get stylish, you can learn a bit of CSS. With this
How interesting. (Score:1)
Re:How interesting. (Score:2)
What does she want on her website? (Score:2)
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.
I know what you're doing! (Score:2)
possibility (Score:2)
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 i
Citydesk comes to mind (Score:2)
First language (Score:1)
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE HER! show her HTML now, and she'll be outdoing you in C+ database apps at 16
HTML->PHP-
The Same Thing You Would Use (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Simple Template (Score:1)
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!
Mozilla Editor + HTML-Kit (Score:2)
Have her use this for basic layout and content and then view source/experiment with the HTML using (free) HTML-Kit [chami.com] to get a grasp of what's going on.
Webmonkey for Kids (Score:3, Insightful)
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/kids/ [lycos.com]
Don't underestimate the kid... (Score:2, Informative)
I'll be lucky if I don't get flamed for this- (Score:2)
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 [aol.com]) still have copies of i
It depends.... (Score:2)
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!
Best kids' HTML book ever (Score:2)
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
Me? (Score:1)
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.
Trust the kid's intelligence (Score:2)
Kids are much more capable than most people give them credit for.
Regards,
Patrick
Web Weaver (Score:2)
Re:Web Weaver (Score:2)
Web Weaver [mcwebsoftware.com]
Denim (Score:1)
TypePad (Score:2)
That should be everything an 11-year old girl needs, unless she has some interest in learning CS.