`Revised 1997 April 30
To link your farm home page to Farms Around the World, email Harold Eddleman:
(indbio@disknet.com)
I invite you to join our webring: Farms Around the World. Just click on the email address above and send a message. It would be nice to have several hundred farms linked from the farms.htm page. There is no charge and we will not be asking you to carry advertising as commercial webrings do.You can delist your farm from this web ring any time by sending another email. The only requirment is that you have a link at your site to http://www.disknet.com/indiana_biolab/farms.htm so that visitors to your site can jump to the Farms Around the World list. That last sentence shows how simple it is to insert a link to Farms Around the World into your home page.
You may want to read the answers to questions others have asked about joining Farms Around the World (FAW) and their questions about writing home pages. This site has a Newsletter about FAW.
Once I get your emessage, I will add your farm home page to the FARMS list. If you definitely want to have a homepage but can't get started, just send me an email telling a little about your farm and I will add a temporary page for you, as I have for Glentor Farm. That can give you a useful start if you do not know how to write a home page. I call this a hosted page and you can read all about hosted pages elsewhere on this site. Hosted pages are free.
I hope your subpages will give information about soil, climate, animals, crops, marketing, problems, economics, wildlife, and other items of interest to other farmers, students, and the general public. This sort of information is very rare on the Internet, but would be useful to geography classes and interesting to farmers who visit your page.
I hope you will email me right away so we can have a farm from your country soon as possible.
If you do not have a homepage, I can help you several ways, free! I am writing some pages on how to write home pages, there will be sample pages. I have unused space and I can put your page there, free, until I need the space. Perhaps, we can start your page there, free, and then you can move it to your ISP provider (such space is ususally offered free by your ISP) when you learn how to do those things. There is no need for you to hire someone to write your home page. We are more interested in your own words. Click on hosted pages in the second paragraph at top of this page.
If you do not have a homepage, here is a simple way to get started. Think of a title, such as, MacIntosh Orchard Home Page or Fulton Strawberry Farm; you can change title later if you don't like it. Then write a paragraph or two about your farm (5 generations, on a famous river or pioneer trail, entertainment farming). Then make list of things about the farm. Now expand each item in the list to a sentence. Anyone reading such a simple page, will gain a real appreciation for your farm and an understanding of what you do. When time permits, start a subpage which gives more information about one of the topics in the list and link that subpage to the sentence where it is mentioned on the home page. Then readers of the home page will be able to get to the subpage by clicking on the link. See Claude Eddleman farm for an example of a home page was written this way. At first, I had only the home page, but each topic on the home page is being into a subpage when I find time. I go back to the Claude Eddleman farm pages frequently and make changes as I get new ideas or one of my siblings finds an error. When you find enough time, you can expand a subpage by linking subpages to it.
Here is more detail on inventing subpages. Suppose at first you had a sentence on the home page saying "We take soil conservation measures very seriously because we do not want to injure the land we have." Later you add a page devoted just to soil conservation practices on your farm, and later you add subpages on ponds, terraces and waterways. Since some of the waterways were very difficult to establish, you later decide to add a page on each waterway, telling or showing with pictures, how you solved the problems. Some farmers reading your page may find that information very useful, and city folks reading the page may develop new respect for farmers and their efforts to preserve the land.
As mentioned above, there are additional pages on my site giving methods for planning a site, writing pages, and uploading the pages to your host (ISP). I will have lots of links to other sites telling you how to write code, add pictures, and make your pages attractive. However, pictures take a long time to download and don't come out very well on some computers. I think most people spend too much time on slow loading graphics. Good text is more interesting and useful to the reader.
You won't be able to believe how easy all this is to accomplish.
Meanwhile, take a few sheets of paper and begin writing down some of the things you can put on your site: farm location so a foreigner can get some idea from a world map, crops, wildlife, soils, how to prepare some dishes eaten in your country, and anything you think might be interesting to farmers in other countries. Visit this page as often as you need, and email me for help. Why not bookmark this page and the main FARMS page?
A useful final suggestion: Don't spend endless hours trying to get a page finished in one night; come back and work on the page at intervals of days or months. After a rest period you will see better ways to write it and notice errors you missed earlier. Try to get a child, spouse, or friend to look at the page and improve the grammar or presentation. They may find some things difficult to read or annoying. You will notice I practice what I preach. It is quite obvious this page is not in final form--this is the fourth time I have come back to work on it.
Related pages in this web site (Those in blue are linked to this page; just click on them)
Background Pages
Pages on WWW Linked to This Page
You may click on these. To be written.
Suggestions, corrections, and comments are appreciated: Contact Harold Eddleman (indbio@disknet.com).