HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

A quick Zotero tutorial video for both Mac and Windows users

I came across this as I was looking for history of search engines and its pretty crazy that the site Topsy has been able to save every single tweet since twitter launched! that's 300 billion tweets!!! and you can search them all as it is open to the public. I hadn't heard about Topsy but it seems like they are gaining a good reputation and going against big search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

This gives a list (and short description) for 20 popular OSS platforms. This article includes examples given in class such as, WordPress (#1 on the list) and Mozilla Firefox (#3 on the list).

A tutorial on how to put RSS code into a website and basic information and history of RSS.

Fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal on Google and how they are handling China's censorship laws.

Even though Prof. French gave a rather in detail tutorial of Zotero in class, here's a visual guide in case you get lost!

I was still a little confused on what a web crawler was exactly. I thought this site was helpful.

Yes, it is! I've already given you credit for one link this week, but that is a good explanation -- even though the page it was last updated in 2005 and the search engine it gives as an example is Alta Vista. :) Alta Vista doesn't even exist anymore; it was acquired by Yahoo awhile ago, I think. Here's the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista

Ya I saw the date, but felt the explanation was good.

This article discusses how US telephone companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc) constantly send phone records to the government without questioning their motives.

That term "metadata" (data about data!) is more interesting than you might think, and this article shows why ...

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."

Interesting article explaining the pros and cons of Zotero vs. EndNote!

My buddy Brian Croxall wrote that. Good find, Claire. It's a very thorough comparison.

Companies make have huge profit margins when it comes to providing Internet.

Boy, I hate sites that have as many ads as that one does. The first site that that article links to is a bit better -- it's from the MIT Technology Review, which is an established and well-known journal / magazine. http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510176/when-will-the-rest-of-us-get-google-fiber/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130205 If you live in Austin, TX, you can buy Internet service directly from Google. Maybe the rest of us will be able to soon.

This Wikipedia page shows all the available online resources open to the public.

Interesting, Taylor. Notice that that page is part of a project called "The Resource Exchange" and/or "The Wikipedia Library." I was just talking to a frequent Wikipedia editor named Jake Orlowitz the other day who's volunteering with the Wikipedia Library; we're going to try to bring him to campus to give a talk. If we do, I'll let y'all know. Thanks for the link!

Another good Common Craft video about search engine optimization -- says that "Google and Bing are the librarians of the Internet." Interesting, and a total coincidence, that this video also uses the notion of a "recipe" to explain how to make your website more searchable -- the same analogy I used to explain an algorithm.

Here is a good little video that explains RSS ... all of these Common Craft videos are good, in fact.

Hey, I never heard that RSS stood for "Rich Site Summary." Huh. Thanks, Milan.

Link to Google's hidden Advanced Search ... useful for narrowing your searches.

Really interesting and quirky introductory video on what SQL is and what it does. Explains one of the exercises given to us in our notes.

"In a world where databases are present everywhere" -- so true! Very amusing, Erin, thanks. As I mentioned to Vincent, you guys won't need to learn SQL for this class, but that video is actually very useful on just the concept of databases and of what SQL is, so that's useful.

A site that gives you different examples of SQL's and how to use them.

Thanks, Vincent, though learning SQL is a pretty advanced skill. It's unlikely you'll need it anytime soon, certainly not for this class. I do regret asking the question on the exam -- maybe I'll give everyone automatic credit!

This website provides tutorials on HTML, CSS, PHP, and Java Script. Under each category you can learn a history and introduction into HTML or CSS and then learn how to create your own website using the step by step instructions.

Not a bad site, Lauren, though I still think http://w3schools.com is better. Heaven knows there are tons of tutorials all over the Internet. Tons of books, too, of course.

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. :)