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How Brad Became A Web Publisher and Writer
 
When i was at high school i wanted to be a writer.  I hung out in the library a lot and eventually became a library monitor.  I started writing stories featuring library monitors and myself.  I would write these stories in Exercise books and then pass them along to other people to read.  Two of my early creations were a spoof of Star Wars, Darren Land Walker was my hero.  There were some differences between the movies and what I wrote.  Another story i wrote was called 'Space Scavenger'.  Although the main character was a little like Han Solo and the story took place in space, the plot was orginal.
 
Times changed and exercise books became a bit of old technology, so my next project was produced on a type writer.  It was a soap opera that ran for about 50 episodes, each being about 3 or 4 pages long.  The series was called 'Student' and it was set in a prison, the students were the prisoners and the teachers were the prison gards.  If you remember an Australian drama series called Prisoner or Cell Block H then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. 
 
I have fond memories of all of the early stories and stuff that i wrote.  I have made an effort to keep these as well and one day maybe will put them online.  As i wanted to be a journalist at one point i did a week's work experience at Penrith Press which is the local newspaper.  I never did get the marks or grades however that would enable me to take studies of writing to the next level, eg Uni etc.  So when I finished high school I had to abondon the dream of being a writer and find a job.  It took me a long while to do this as I didn't really know what I wanted to do, the only other thing i knew about at the time was how a library operates and I applied but didn't get a job at the local library.  Eventually I became a public servant; eventually when the chance came to go into the IT Department I took it. SInce 1990 I'd become interested in computers and I thought it was great that my hobby would become my job.  Job wise I haven't looked back, but I still had an interest in writing.
 
Within the IT department I started to write a Help Desk hints news letter and I also wrote manuals and doco for computer users. I'd started using the Internet in September 1995 spending much of my time emailing and surfing the Web. After surfing the web and seeing many different homepages and web sites I eventually decided I wanted a homepage of my own. Lucky for me my ISP provided space for home pages.  The only problem now was that I didn't know how to do one, I thought it must involve some sort of computer programming or required you to be a rocket scientist. I didn't think I'd ever be able to do one.

It was a friend of mine Tony (Tone) that showed me that this HTML stuff wasn't really as hard as I'd thought and it would be possible for me to make my own pages. Tony had been mucking around with HTML himself, having a few test pages. He explained to me that HTML pages were what homepages really were. HTML pages were really just text files with a .htm or .html extensions.

These HTML files were just text files that contained the text and graphics of the page plus Tags that provided my web browser (Netscape 2 at the time) with instructions on how to show the pages. In about 15 minutes one day at work he created and explained each step needed to make a Web page.

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>HTML Test Page</TITLE>
<BODY>
<H1>This is some text in Heading 1</H1>
<H2>This is some text in heading 2</H2>
<H3>This is some text in Heading 3</H3>
<H4>This is some text in Heading 4</H4>
<H5>This is some Text in Heading 5</H5>
<H6>This is some text in Heading 6</H6>
<H1><CENTER>This Text Is Centered</CENTER><P>
<B>This text is bold</B><P>
<I>This text is italic</I><P>
<U>this text is Underlined</U>
<H1> These are examples of links<P>
<A HREF="http://www.microsoft.com">A Link To Microsoft</a><p>
<A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com">A Link To Yahoo</a>
</H1>
</BODY>
</HTML>
 
 This file didn't do very much and wouldn't win any design awards, but it was enough to make me understand how HTML worked. So I did my first home page called Brad's Place (i worked a long time to come up with the name).  From memory it first went online June 4th 1996.  I'd taken my first steps towards becoming a web publisher and the writer inside me was at last able to express himself.

 If you would like to see the first site (actually I think this is the second version of the first site) I did then click here.