Relevant

 

How to link to the ICRA label on your site

Windows version

This walk through assumes that your web site is essentially the first thing you've used your computer for. For many users, the level of detail here may be rather more than you need. For others, hopefully it will help to build up your confidence!

These are the steps we're going to take:

Check the terminology

The computer industry has given us more new words than most. The good news is that you only need to know a few to be able to add your ICRA label.

  • HTML Source File Most pages on the internet, however simple or complicated, are written in a common language known as HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language since you asked!) Some pages may use additional computer languages and there are important variations, but at a basic level, you can assume that even the most complex site has HTML at its heart.

    Scary? It needn't be - most of it you can ignore!

  • Link tag This is the piece of HTML code we sent you. It will look something like this:

    <link rel="meta" href="http://www.example.org/labels.rdf" type="application/rdf+xml" title="ICRA labels" />

    In HTML terms, this is known as a Link/rel tag. This tag will link your site's content to your ICRA label.

  • PICS tag This is the piece of HTML code that gives the PICS version of your ICRA label. It will look something like this:

    <meta http-equiv="pics-label" content='(pics-1.1 "http://www.icra.org/pics/vocabularyv03/" l gen true for "http://www.example.org" r (n 0 s 0 v 0 l 0 oa 1 c 0 ))' />

    In HTML terms, this is known as a meta tag. This tag will enable your label to be read by PICS filters.

  • Windows Notepad This is the basic "text editor" which comes with every copy of Windows. You can access it from the accessories section of the Start Menu. In effect, it is a very simple word processor. We're going to use this simple program so that we are sure that the software is not going to "make changes all by itself." Notepad isn't clever enough to do that!

Locating your HTML source files

Launch Windows Notepad, click the [File] Menu and select [Open]. This will bring up the window below:

Open dialogue

Notepad usually begins by looking in the "My Documents" folder. There you will see the various folders on your system. Navigate your way to the folder which contains the files you've been working on to create your web site. We can't be more specific than that - everyone organizes their folders in different ways.

Like most programs, Notepad's Open dialogue only shows the files which it created - Text Documents - and you may not have any of those. In the image below, Notepad is looking at the folder which contains all the English language files for an earlier version of this site.

Open dialogue

We need it to show all files. To do this, click the arrow to the right of the highlighted box and you'll see the two options - Text Documents and All Files, as shown below:

Select file type

Click "All Files" and you will see - you guessed it - all the files in that folder, including the important HTML files you're after. See below:

Showing all files

You should have a file called either index.htm or index.html. We will start by linking this file. This is the file which is first to open when someone visits your site. Some programs may call it default.htm. Either way, that's the one to open. You will then see a load of HTML, similar to (but not the same as) that shown below:

A load of HTML

We've highlighted the important part. This is called the Head section. Notice it begins with <HEAD> and ends with </HEAD>. We need to make a bit of space for our Link tag. In this example below, we clicked at the end of the line which contains the page's title and then pressed [Enter] to insert a new line.

Making a space

You can put this new line ANYWHERE in the HEAD section.

Leave this window open while going on to the next section.

Copy and paste the Link and PICS tags

Open up the e-mail we sent you containing the Link and PICS tags. (Left) click the mouse just in front of the opening "<" and hold the button down as you drag the mouse to the final ">". This will highlight the whole of both tags. On the keyboard, press Ctrl+C (both keys together). This is a standard Windows operation which copies whatever is highlighted into a special part of the computer's memory called the Clipboard.

Now go back to the Notepad file you have open and click on the empty line. Press Ctrl+V (both keys together). This is the standard Windows operation which pastes whatever is in the Clipboard into wherever you have the cursor in the active Window.

You should see something like this:

Pasting the Link tag

Now repeat this process for all the files that make up your website. The Link and PICS tags should go in the Head section of each of those files. And that's all there is to it. However, most web authors who label their site with us also then add the ICRA logo to their home page. If you want to do this, read on. If not save and close the files and then upload them to your site in the way you are used to.

Adding a "Labelled with ICRA" link

We have provided a wide variety of buttons which you can add to your site to:

  1. Link to a page about the label you have applied
  2. Show your support for our aims of protecting minors from potentially offensive or harmful material while preserving free speech.

We don't expect pride of place on your web site - down at the bottom is fine by us! We do ask that the button or text should link to a specific part of our web site and that if you're carrying the button, you're also carrying the actual label as described above.

In a short while, you'll be going to a new window in which you'll see all the available ICRA logos. When you've found the one that best suits your site, put the mouse over it and click the right button to bring up the small menu, see below:

Selecting a button

Select [Save Picture As] and then navigate your way to the folder in which you are keeping all the images for your site. Then click [Save]. You can now close that extra browser window and return to this page.

OK, now you know what to expect, click here.

Now that you have a copy of the logo you want, please add it to your site in the same way as other images. Please link it to:

"http://www.icra.org/sitelabel"

This will give visitors to your site an introduction to the ICRA system and allow them to see your label.

If you prefer, rather than adding an ICRA logo you can just add just the words "Labelled with ICRA" (or Labeled with ICRA in the US) to your site and link that back to us. Please link to the specific page quoted above.

That's it! When you're ready, you should now upload the site to the web and test...

Testing your label

ICRA provides a tool on this website that allows you to test whether your label is in place. Please see the links below.

Further support

There are as many ways of creating a web site as there are web sites. It is therefore simply not possible to provide a complete description which would cover any and all eventualities. This walk through is about as generic as we can make it. So, if you are left confused then we suggest you take the following action:

  • Buy in some nice coffee and/or wine
  • Perhaps add a few bowls of nuts, crispy snacks and dips, chocolates etc.
  • Think about your friends and how nice it would be to see them again - especially the ones who are perhaps more confident on the computer than you
  • Ask them over...