Yes you CAN make web pages on a Mac! I know because I make mine on one. This page was made on one. Every single letter.

In April my family got an iMac. There was a big fight about the color. My little sister Erica wanted Grape, my dad wanted Blueberry, I wanted Lime, and my mom picked Strawberry because it "goes with the kitchen." So it's Strawberry. It's actually pretty cool. It looks like a giant see-through piece of candy, and you can see the insides.

The problem is that every time I say I made my web page on our Mac, some PC kid at school says "you can't make web pages on a Mac." Um, yes you can. I'm tired of explaining it, so here's everything, in one place. Then I'm going to tell PC webmasters some stuff they should stop doing, because it's breaking their pages for me.

Every Mac comes with SimpleText. It's basically the Mac version of Notepad. You type your HTML in it, save it, and open it in your browser to look at it. That's how I made my first page, and it works fine.

BUT. SimpleText can't handle a file bigger than 32K. My Star Wars links page got bigger than 32K in July, and SimpleText wouldn't let me work on it anymore. I almost cried. (Not really. A little.) If your pages are small you'll never notice. If you're like me and have 140 links on one page, keep reading.

So my dad found BBEdit Lite. It's free, from a company called Bare Bones Software. It opens big files with no problem, and it has a Find and Replace that's way better than SimpleText's, so when I changed my background color I fixed it on every line at once.

There's also a regular BBEdit that costs money and has buttons for HTML stuff. The Lite one doesn't, so you type everything yourself. That's how you learn it anyway. My dad says that's what he said about long division.

Here's a weird thing about Macs. A Mac doesn't need .html (or .gif or anything) on the end of a file name. It already knows what kind of file it is, from hidden information that gets saved with the file. So you can name a page "My Page" and the Mac is totally fine with that.

But the GeoCities.us computer that your page lives on DOES need it, and so does everybody's browser. So always put .html on the end of your pages and .gif or .jpg on your pictures. Name your front page index.html. Use all small letters and no spaces. (A Mac lets you have 31 letters in a file name, but short is better.)

I use the GeoCities.us File Manager. It's in the Member Center. You click the Browse button, find your file on the Mac, and upload it. It works exactly the same on a Mac as on a PC. You can send up to 10 files at a time, and each one can be up to 1 MB, which is way bigger than any of my pages.

Some people use an FTP program instead. My friend's dad uses one called Fetch. The File Manager is fine for me.

The iMac mouse is round, like a hockey puck, and it has ONE button. PC people always ask me "but how do you right-click?"

You hold down the Control key and click. That gets you the same kind of menu, with Save Image As and View Source and all that. Or in the browser you can just hold the mouse button down on a picture until the menu pops up. Either way works. Saving pictures off the Free Clip Art page is easy.

I'll admit the round mouse is weird. You can't tell which way is up without looking. My sister holds it sideways and then wonders why the arrow goes the wrong way.

Lighter on a Mac, darker on a PC. For my space page I made a dark blue background with black stars. On our iMac it looked awesome. At school on the PCs it looked like a black rectangle. You couldn't even see the stars.

Here's why. Macs and PCs show colors at different brightness. It's called "gamma." My dad looked it up: Macs use a gamma of 1.8, and most PCs are more like 2.2 or 2.5, and a higher number means darker. So the same picture looks darker on a PC than on a Mac.

What to do about it: if you make your pictures on a Mac, make them a little lighter than looks right to you. If you make them on a PC, they'll look kind of washed out on a Mac, so don't make them super pale. Best of all, look at your page on both. I check mine at school.

Smaller on a Mac. Text looks smaller on a Mac too. I didn't know why until I read Charlotte Purvis's page Same Face Twice, which is all about fonts on Macs and PCs. She explains that a Mac draws its screen as if there are 72 dots to the inch, and Windows pretends there are 96, so the same font at the same size comes out about a quarter smaller on a Mac. She says never use size 1 for anything longer than a copyright line. PC people: when you use size 1, on my Mac it's like ants.

Spaces in file names. "My Dog.gif" might work on your computer, but lots of times it breaks once it's on the Web, and the address turns into My%20Dog.gif. Name it mydog.gif or my_dog.gif.

Backslashes. This is the big one. On the Web, slashes go THIS way: / . A lot of PC people type them the Windows way:

Internet Explorer on Windows fixes backslashes for you, so you never even notice. On my Mac I just get a broken picture icon where your dog should be. I've seen whole pages where every single picture was broken for me because of this.

Capital letters that don't match. If your picture is named Dog.GIF and your page says dog.gif, it works on your PC because Windows doesn't care about capitals. The computer your page lives on does care, so once it's uploaded, it's broken for everybody, not just Mac people. Use small letters for everything and you'll never have this problem.

Windows-only fonts with no backup. If you put <font face="MS Sans Serif">, a Mac doesn't have that font, so I get plain Times instead. Century Gothic is almost as bad: Charlotte says it comes with Microsoft Office, not with Windows, so lots of people on both kinds of computers don't have it. Give a backup list, like this, so everybody gets something good:

The browser goes down the list and uses the first one the computer has. Helvetica is on every Mac, so that's the safety net.

Things PCs are better at, honestly:

• Games. Way more games. I'm not going to pretend.
• Everybody at school has one, so it's easier to share stuff.
• The right mouse button is faster than Control-click. I admit it.
• When our iMac froze last week, I had to push the little reset button on the side with a straightened-out paper clip. That was kind of embarrassing.

But I still like my Mac better. It's strawberry, it's quiet, and I made this whole page on it. Mac or PC, it doesn't matter what you build on. What matters is that your page works on the other kind too. That's all I'm asking.