Internet & Society Course Blog

Here are links to some material that we have looked at in class in the past couple of weeks.

Videos

• JibJab on This Land
• George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People
  by: The Legendary K.O.
• Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog on these two

Free software

• HTTrack for downloading entire Web sites
• GIMP - check this previous post for specific links
• Inkscape

Related blogs

• Freedom to Tinker
• Lessig’s blog

Fun site

• 
  Kiss This Guy

Here is the list of extensions we discussed in class, plus some additional ones.

UPDATE: Fixed a bad link (thanks, Andrea!). Feel free to leave links to your favorite extensions in the comments to this post.

In preparation for Wednesday’s class about Firefox and its advantages, you may want to read this summary of why Firefox is worth giving a try. Also, if you haven’t yet, you can download it here. For detailed instructions on how to install it (Windows), check this site.

You can also start looking around on this page for possible themes in case you want to change the layout of your browser. Doodle Plastik is the one I have installed for the profile I use 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.

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.

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.

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.