Internet & Society Course Blog

After you create three categories you may notice that not all three are necessarily showing up on your blog. This is because only categories to which you have posted entries will show up on the blog.

By Sunday, you will have had to post an entry under “Readings”, so that category will be showing. You will have also already had to post an entry under “Assignments” or “Other Assignments” since you will have had to post your IT use diary. In order to make sure that the third category is also showing, be sure to post one additional entry in the “Extras” or “Other” or “Non-class related” category as well. This can be a link to a favorite Web site or even a blank space-holder stating that you are just posting the entry to show your third category.

UPDATE: Putting up an additional “Extra” entry is not due by tonight since this requirement was not made clear in class.

You may want to add images to your posts. Here is how to go about it.

First: what not to do. Do not link to an image on someone else’s Web site directly. Each time someone looks at a Web page in their browser, the image will have been downloaded to their machine. This means that you are using up bandwidth from that person’s account.

Instead of linking (or what’s called “hot linking”) to someone’s image on another site, create a local copy. Of course, you should only proceed with this if you know that the particular license associated with the image allows copying.

The problem with creating a local copy in our case is that you don’t have rights to upload images to your blog directory. So what to do?

Here’s an option: you can post it on an image-hosting site and link to it there. Such hot-linking is okay.

You may consider creating a free account on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Yahoo! owns Flickr so if you have a Yahoo! account then you can just use that.

Once you have a free account on Flickr, you can upload up to 200 images to your account (there are some limits on how much you can upload per month). Flickr then gives you the option of looking at different sizes of your images and choosing one for inclusion on your Web site.

You click on an image to view it. You then click on the All Sizes button above it. The thumbnail or small version would work well for blogs. Here is an example of both:

You don’t have to figure out the code with which to include your images in a blog post, Flickr gives it to you automatically. In fact, the system even lets you blog about an image straight from the site. Just click on the link above the link that says “Blog this” and follow the instructions.

This discussion on how to be productive in college has advice that may be helpful to some of you.

Here is a list of blog details and assignments that are due by 9pm on Sunday, October 2nd.

1. Blog theme change (if you have not yet requested that a theme be uploaded to your directory, you have to request that by Friday 5pm)
2. Changing the comment options so they are not required to be moderated
3. Adding a Blogroll (must include at least five links to blogs not related to class). Add links by going to the Links tab and then choosing the Add Links tab.
4. Make sure to have at least three Categories. One should be called “Readings”, another “Assignments” (or Other Assignments, or something along those lines to signify required assignments that are not related to the readings) and one should be called “Other” or “Extras” or something else that’s additional. (You can have more than three Categories, but you have to have at least three.)
5. A post about your IT diary notes and reflections
6. A post about at least two of the following readings: Gilbert, Herring et al., Shirky, Wellman and Gulia

Not required, but highly recommended:
1. Addition of comment spam guard.

Previously I explained how feeds can help you keep track of blog (and other site) updates.

Here, I tell you the exact address of feeds for your classmates’ blogs in case you want to get updatse about them. (Most feed aggregators/readers do not require you to know the exact feed address, it’s enough to give them the Web site of the blog that is of interest to you. But just in case they require an exact feed address, here is what that is.)

If required to enter the exact feed URL (Web address) of a blog, this is what you enter for class blogs:
http://www.nublogs.com/nameofblog/wp-feed.php
.. where you replace “nameofblog” with the name of the specific blog of interest.

Some of you may have lost the link to your login page due to the theme change. Here is how you find where to log in to your blog.

Go to http://www.nublogs.com/yourblogname
.. where you replace “yourblogname” with your own blog’s handle (remember: all lower case!).

Then append the following to the end of that line: wp-login.php

It will look like this: http://www.nublogs.com/yourblogname/wp-login.php
.. again, where you replace “yourblogname” with your own blog’s name

Here is how you change your settings so comments on your blog do not require moderation.

1. Log in to your blog.
2. Click on the Options tab.
3. Click on the Discussions tab.
4. Under “Before a comment appears:” (third section) uncheck the following:
* An administrator must approve the comment (regardless of any matches below)
* Comment author must have a previously approved comment
These two should NOT have a check mark next to them.
5. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and press the button “Update Options” to save the changes.

Services exist to help you keep track of blog updates without having to visit blogs individually all the time. You can subscribe to the feeds of Web sites.

One way to do this is to set up an account on a blog aggregator service such as Bloglines. That service will aggregate blog content on a Web site for you.

Another option is to subscribe to feed notifications that you receive on email. Two such services are RMail and RSSFwd. You tell them the feed address of the Web site of interest and your email, and they send you updates every time the site of interest is updated.
(In order to avoid being overwhelmed by the amount of email, you may want to consider adding a filter to your email program for feed notifications to be deposited in a specific folder without even showing up in your Inbox.)

A third option is to use the feed-reader capabilities of some browsers such as Firefox. Firefox gives you the option of adding Live Bookmarks to your Bookmarks list. Live Bookmarks are feeds.

Note that the use of feeds is not restricted to blogs. Many other sites now offer this option of keeping up-to-date on content. Whenever you see a “Feeds” or “RSS” graphic/link on a site, it means that you can subscribe to its content.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used to create documents on the Web. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (it’s a recursive acronym), which is used to create dynamic Web pages. (That is, the Web page is generated when you call it up based on additional information available.)

If you want to play around with changing some things in your theme templates, you will need to know some amount of basic HTML and feel comfortable enough with computer code to look around in the PHP files to see what you may be able to change. HTML files usually have a .html ending (although in some cases they are truncated to .htm), while PHP files end in .php. Although none of the files you’ll encounter here end in .htm(l), knowing basic HTML will help you tweak other types of files. It will also help in writing your posts.

In addition to PHP files, there is also a file ending in .css in your theme folder. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Information in such a file is used to style Web pages. One important difference among the different themes we are using across our blogs is that they rely on different CSS files to render them. If you want to change the color or size of fonts on your blog, you should look for related information in the .css file.

For example, colors are usually denoted by six or three numbers/letters (often a mix of the two) so if you want to change the color of something on your blog, look for such six- or three-digit codes preceded by a # sign.

There are numerous HTML guides online. Here is one that explains some of the basics clearly. Here are some pointers on how you can achieve certain outcomes in CSS (understanding this will require some basic HTML knowledge though). This tutorial lets you play with CSS code right on the page. Finally, here is a tutorial that brings together basics about HTML and CSS in one document.

Here is a bit of code that will help protect against spam in the comments. We will add this code to the Comments Template right after this line:
<label for="url"><small>Website</small></label></code>

<input type="text" name="extra" id="url" value="<?php echo $comment_extra; ?>" size="28" tabindex="4" />
<label for="extra"><?php _e("Enter the word blog (required)"); ?></></label>
</input>

UPDATE: There was a mistake in the code that had been posted here originally. There was a superfluous space in between “<” and “?php _e” that caused a problem. Please fix this on your blog.

Also, note that if you have changed the theme of your blog, you may not find the above “Website” line in your code. Nonetheless, look for a line that said Website or URI and place this code below that section.

UPDATE 2 (Oct 3): Please note that an additional section of code needs to be entered in another file. Since you don’t have access to that file, I will enter that snippet for everyone.

Thanks to Jeff Barr for making this available. The code above is a somewhat tweaked version of Jeff’s original.

GIMP is a very sophisticated free photo-editing program. It is packed with features rivaling related programs that sell for hundreds of dollars.

For Windows, in addition to grabbing Gimp, you’ll also have to install GTK+ runtime environment. Don’t let that hold you back. Installation is very straight forward. The site also offers detailed instructions for MacOSX and UNIX.

The entire user manual is also available online.

More:

• GIMPshop tweaks GIMP so it resembles the menu structure and naming conventions of Photoshop more closely helping users who are used to that program. Here is a resource guide for all things related including links to Mac and Windows downloads.
• The GIMP User Group offers free detailed tutorials
• The Grokking the GIMP book offers numerous tips for how to use the program
• Seashore is an open source project to create an OS X native graphics program based on GIMP. (I’m not using a Mac these days so I couldn’t check this out myself, but some Mac users seem enthusiastic.)

As an added incentive to visiting this blog regularly, you will see posts categorized as Extras. These posts contain material not required for class, but information that may be of interest to you and that I believe will be beneficial to many.

Blogroll is the term used for the list of links bloggers include on their blogs to other blogs of interest.

As part of your blogging, you are required to link to some blogs that are not associated with our class. How do you find other blogs? There are all sorts of possible ways, here are a few pointers.

* If you already know of any blogs you can check to see whether they have blogrolls (many do) and see to what other blogs they link. Since bloggers often link to other blogs similar to their own, if you like a blog, chances are good you may be interested in some of the blogs on its blogroll.

* You can do a general search on a search engine for blogs by a certain topic. In the search field, enter the topic of interest and then add blog to the query. This may lead you to some relevant blogs.

* You can do a search on a topic of interest to you on a blog-specific search engine such as Feedster or Technorati.

* Find a blog hosted on Blogspot (e.g. this one) and click on the “Next Blog” icon in the upper right hand corner. This will take you to another random blog hosted on the Blogger.com system.

* You can find popular blogs by looking at lists of top blogs where popularity is measured by the number of other blogs linking to them. The Technorati 100 is one such list, The Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem is another. There are additional top lists that can point you to blogs. The Daypop Top 40 lists pages that are popular within the blogging community, that is, pages to which many blogs have linked recently. If you click on “Citations” you will see which blogs linked to the particular page and thereby may find blogs of interest.

* Word-of-mouth (whether in person, on email, on blogs) remains an important way to find interesting sites on the Web. Keep an eye out for recommendations. Also feel free to post a comment to this post if you can think of other ways to come across blogs that may be of interest.

You are required to change the theme (style/layout/design) of your blog. This Web site lists dozens of options. Choose one of the themes from the drop down menu on the upper right hand side of the screen and a blog with that design will come up. Choose another one to consider a different design. We will discuss in class how you go about changing the theme on your blog.

An example of a different theme is the layout of this course blog. It is a tweaked version of the Journalized Winter theme available on the theme picker Web site. I tweaked it to reflect NU’s colors and made some additional changes to the layout (e.g. posts in the middle of the page are not separated by a date field).

Welcome to the Internet and Society Course Instructor’s Blog.