Group items tagged

This website shows the basics of writing HTML, and gives a rather long list of tags.

The New York Times website is down today (by some reports it's because Syrian hackers have attacked it), but here's a (probably illegal) copy of a helpful column on "Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User" by the New York Times's technology reviewer, David Pogue. This documents also contains all the comments. All 1149 of them. :) Many of those comments have helpful tips as well. Even though this was published in 2008, it's still helpful.

This a great website not only describing how web crawlers work, but how you can create on your own. Descriptions and pictures really help to create one if your stuck too.

That is a good tutorial -- thanks, Gordon. My own PHP skills are good enough to build this, though at the moment I don't need to. I had forgotten the synonym "scrapers," too. Useful quotation: "One typical task that Google performs is to pull all the links from a page and see which sites they are endorsing."

These are pretty basic tips, but the .gif images of the instructions are really incredibly easy to understand.

A YouTube video that gives you some basic information on what HTML is.

This web page has an easy and detailed explanation about what a URL is and its three basic parts: the protocol, the server name, and the resource ID.

In theory that's a good resource, Jimin, except that it's wrong. :) The "server name" could be anything, and has very little to do with the domain name. It is true that you can usually log in to a server (a remote computer) by giving whatever program you're logging in with the domain name, but that doesn't mean that the server itself has the same name as the website. That page is also very, very wrong in calling the the top-level domain (.org etc.) the "domain name." It's important to note that that page was almost certainly written by a librarian, not a tech professional. (Of course, I'm an English PhD, not a tech professional myself, but still.) And when I looked at the source code, I could tell that it was hand-coded in HTML, which indicates to me that it's probably many years old. Wish there were a "dislike" button. :)

Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

A blog post (nearly a scholarly article) on common errors made by Optical Character Recognition, including the error of thinking that the medial S is an f.

This link gives information on the difference between a directory and a folder. The reason I found this link so useful was because it outlines the difference between the two for Mac and PC users.

Congratulations, Gordon, on being the very first to post! :) I will say I'm not very impressed with the link, though -- it's a bit fuzzy on whether there is or is not a difference between a directory and a folder, except in a technical sense on Windows Vista. (I'd argue that in general there isn't, though I grant you there are special cases.) And you can't tell who wrote that piece, and it comes from the support database of a particular software company rather than from a site that's dedicated to explanations / teaching / learning / education. At least Wikipedia is deliberately trying to educate people, and it's better on this issue, I'd say, and provides a clearer argument that a directory is something structural in an OS whereas a folder is a visual "metaphor" for a collection of files, which may or may not be an actual directory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing)#Folder_metaphor

Mostly useful for people who use Chrome, but most of these undoubtedly have analogues or versions in Firefox. A lot of good extensions for news, productivity and research, plus some stuff that's just plain cool.

While this website is helpful, many of the apps do not seem to be useful to everyday browsing, excluding a few in the Education section of the article. Granted, I still went and downloaded a lot of those apps because, as Nathan said above me, they're pretty cool.

Browser extensions are definitely neat -- all the browsers have them now, pretty much. Firefox was the first browser to be extensible like this, so there tend to be a lot of extensions available for it. Zotero, which we're going to learn about next week, started out as a Firefox extension. I thought about defining "extension" in core concepts, but it's maybe a little more advanced than that. Extensions (also called "add-ons" and "plugins") are basically little apps that "plug in" to a big app.

As the title says, this is the oldest site online. It uses hypertext and uses links within the text to browse information. It is a very basic, black and white site that really shows how far we have come since then.

That is great, Stephanie! ibiblio.org is one of my favorite sites -- it's run by the library and information school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it has a fair amount of tech history. It's similar in some ways to archive.org. I'm curious: how did you find it?

I actually found it through a BBC article a few months back. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22652675 The site I posted is not the original but is a copy of the original that Tim Berners-Lee kept.

Don't forget to add a comment that describes what's at the link, Milan. I'll give you credit this time, but not next time. That is clearly an *ancient* web page. If you do View Source on it, too, you can tell (at least I can) that it was hand-coded in HTML rather than generated by a CMS. And all the tags are written in capital letters, . No one does that anymore.

Plus, crews.org is a middle school. I don't really trust what they say about the Internet. :) Of course, if it's "just for fun" ...

This article explains the difference between the internet and the WWW by describing the internet as a network of computers and the WWW as one of the modes we use to access certain files within this network. It also states that-- as we had discussed in class-- though the WWW is probably the most widely-used mode of accessing the internet, other ways, such as through email and instant messaging, are also available.

This article explains the difference between the internet and the WWW by describing the internet as a network of computers and the WWW as one of the modes we use to access certain files within this network. It also states that-- as we had discussed in class-- though the WWW is probably the most widely-used mode of accessing the internet, other ways, such as through email and instant messaging, are also available.

This is a slide show about the differences between Apple computers and computers that are deemed "PCs". It compares everything from design to software. I thought it was interesting to see how people see these computers and what the actual difference between them were.

I see that both you and Marion have shared links from HowStuffWorks.com -- that site usually has pretty good information, especially for basic stuff. I find it interesting that they're classified as an "entertainment" site; they pay people a little (not much) to write the articles, and then they sell ads on the content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_stuff_works I know a guy who works there -- Jonathan Strickland. Great guy and great podcaster.

Interesting, Taylor, although I wish that article had a date on it. I bet it's a couple of years old: both Macs and PCs change a lot. Still, those differences still apply. Technically, of course, Macs are PCs, since PC stands for "Personal Computer," which a Mac is. But what can you do -- language is slippery.

In addition to the content management systems we talked about today like wordpress, there are plenty of other great content management systems out there for people to use.

Although that article was written way back in 2009, I'd say it's still pretty accurate. All the CMSes I know of are in that list, plus some I hadn't heard of.

History, development, and uses for Zotero

Way to get a jump-start on next week's lessons, Max!

This book, Digital History, exists in print form as well, but it is entirely available for free on the open web. It is written for historians who want to "go digital," so you as undergrads (and not necessarily History majors!) aren't exactly its audience, but the book is nevertheless excellent as an introduction to the underpinnings of the internet and the web.

Since we were talking about the history of Google earlier today, I found this and I thought I'd share with you all. It gives a great detailed timeline (provided by Google themselves) on their history.

That is a good link, Paola, thanks.