Monday, October 18, 2004

Lycos' Tripod powered by Trellix

While visiting a university last week, and seeing how they had their students choose any free webspace to publish their portfolios, I saw one portfolio published using GeoCities. The ease with which the graduate student published their own portfolios motivated me to find other free systems.

In my search for more free web publishing sites, I stumbled upon Tripod powered by Trellix on a website sponsored by Lycos. After the struggles that I had using GeoCities with my Mac, this site was a breath of fresh air. It uses Trellix Web Express, "a complete, browser-based web site building tool and hosting platform for online communities." As my seventeenth completed portfolio, I was able to create a set of pages, add hyperlinks, and format the document as I wanted. I'm not sure about adding artifacts that aren't in HTML or image format, but the program has a page that allows uploading ten images at a time.

The free version of the system also allows 20 MB of storage, and has quite a few templates that can be used to build the website. I could also pick from a handful of pre-designed pages. It was very easy to customize the page, remove elements that weren't needed and add components at precise places on the page. There was no need for knowledge of HTML.

The website allows users to add a blog and each entry can be assigned a new or existing category. I also figured out how to link to the blog from the first page on the site. I did not figure out how to add the link to the navigation bar. If you can ignore the banner ads at the top of the page, this is not a bad free solution.

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