In case we have not made it abundantly clear before, we think the greatest strength of the web is the self-expression it allows to anyone who can read and write and can find their way to a computer.

It occured to us the other day, as we lounged about in the palatial Shore Journal Offices, that it would be wonderful to see other web publications spring up here on ICNet, and we have made some effort to promote such a renaissance.

We spent a day last week at with our daughter, Degan, her exceptionally cool friends, and Ellen Walston, the Media Specialist down at Snow Hill High School. We also spent time with the staff of the Snow Hill Eagle. They are all very bright and charming people, and we are sure that soon we will see a publication there. We look forward to it, and will read it with great interest.

But surely, there are others, and to those who have ever wished to begin such an enterprise, we offer this step-by-step guide to stealing this publication, in the hopes that it will assist you in creating your own. Please do so without the slightest hesitation, this is, at best, a good example for an HTMl 101 course, but it does work. All one need do is change the words, and the pictures, and it could as easily be The Monkey Journal, The Money Journal, or Waldo's Wacky Web Pages.

The first step in stealing a magazine is stealing a page of it. This is easily accomplished by activating File , Save As... and then specifying a location. The location refers to a directory on your computer where the file is to be stored. It is a good idea to store all of the magazine's files in the same directory.

Once a page is stored on your computer, you can use an editor to change it, and your browser to look at it. This is a fun and simple process. Quite often, a writer becomes fatigued, and grows weary of staring at their own words. This fatigue is usually forgotten when the newspaper or magazine is published, and they "see themselves in print."

This same effect can quickly be achieved by looking at your writing with a browser, it takes on a more substantial appearance when viewed this way. It also allows you to correct mistakes and to format your documents the way you wish them to appear.

The only rule to keep in mind when working this way is that changes to documents must be written to the disk and retrieved from the disk before they can be observed. For example, if you were to save this document to your hard disk, and then open it using your browser, it would contain this same text. (The colors and backgrounds might be different, and you may be missing images, but we will attend to that in a moment). If you change the words, you have to save them (using File/Save) and then reload the document with your browser, in order to see the changes. This is really quite simple to do.

If you save and re-examine a page this way, you will note that the images and backgrounds are missing. Not to worry. If you look at the source document again, you will find lines which contain the words:

This tells the browser to find the file called "filename.jpg" and put it in the page. When you saved the file, the browser did not automatically save the image. To do that, you have to retrieve the image itself. No problem.

Activate View, then Source. This will open a window which will display the source html document, or the text that makes up the page you are looking at.

Look through this page, and find the names of the files which the original document called. Change the name of the file which you just retrieved to the name of the picture, and press ENTER. If the image is stored in the same directory on the host computer, it will send back the image by itself. You can save this image into the same directory you used to store the first file. Then, when you read the page using your browser, it will find the image and load it into the page. Simple.

(If that is confusing, try doing it with this page. This file is named cfp41029.htm which is simply a coding system we use here to keep track of things. The first three characters are the author's initials, the next character is the article-number in the issue for that author, and the next four characters are the date. The extension "htm" means it is an html file. At the top of the page, you will note a reference to an image "stamp.gif". This is the picture of Meshach at the top of the page.

Save this page into a directory. Then, go up to the location or url line in your browser, and change the filename from "cfp41029.htm" to "stamp.gif". When you press [ENTER], your browser should display his happy little face, and nothing else. Save him into the same directory.

When you use your browser to read the file from your disk, (using File, Open File... and then finding cfp41029.htm), it will display with Meshach proudly adorning the top-right-hand corner of the page.

It will not appear to be the same color background, though, unless you happen to keep things a textured beige in your browser all the time. We use a background file called "tan.gif" which you can retrieve using the same method, and store it in the same place, along with the other files.

When you reload it again, it should look the same as it does when you read it here. Except that now, you can turn off your modem, and still read it.

That in itself is not much fun, but using a simple editor, you can open the file and make it say whatever you want it to say. If you save that, and reload it with the browser, the new page will exist, the old page will cease to, and you will be on your way.

There are so many resources to help you write better html than we do here that there are now guides to the guides to html resources on the web. Soon, there will be guides to the guides to the guides.

You should use them, of course, but if you're like most people, you don't want to read the instructions until it's actually too late. That's ok, they can be obtained through a number of sites if that is how you like to do things.

If you would like your publication to be done tonight, though, try this method: Save all the files in this issue of the journal, most importantly, index.htm . This is the initial file that is called when a directory is accessed by a browser, and it has to exist. Looking at this file, you will notice a series of lines which contain the following:

(Note: the "{" and "}" characters are actually "<" and ">" but the browser will just interpret this as a link if we put it that way, and we are too lazy to look up how to avoid it. Ah well.)

This statement can be translated into English as follows: "This is an anchor hypertext reference to a file called "cfp41029.html". Display the words "Steal This Magazine, Please !" as a link on the page, and if the user activates that link, go to the file called "cfp41029.html"

It is that simple. All one has to do is relate words in the body of copy to names of files, either images or other text files. The browser does all the real work.

If you were to take the time to save every page and every image from the Journal, you could read the whole thing without being connected to the server at all. While that would be foolish, (it won't be any better there, we don't think), it would be a simple matter then to make it into anything you like.

We don't expect that many folks will do that, having more natural sense than we do, you know how much work it might end up being. But we hope that a student among our readers, with enough curiousity and enough energy, may decide to do so, and that shortly we will see a much fresher, decidedly clever and uproariously funny publication out here in short order.

In fact, our entire editorial staff is at your complete disposal, should you decide that is something you wish to do. The day we spent with our daughter, Degan, and Ellen Walston at Snow Hill High School was the most gratifying day we have had in a long time. There are a lot of schools, a lot of kids, and a lot of stories to be told. We look forward to reading every one of them.

There is one consideration, of course. The purpose of copyright is not to limit ideas, but to protect individuals. Please keep in mind that the articles in the Journal are copyrighted by the authors, and that most original artwork and photography on the web is protected as well. Usually, a simple email message to the owner will provide you with permission for use, and that kind of courtesy not only avoids problems, but often results in new contacts, new correspondents, and new friends.

Abby Hoffman would be proud.