HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

Which is better, OSS or Proprietary Software? This article poses both sides of the arguments, mainly that OSS is lauded for it's "community" support, while Proprietary Software is backed by professional, tried and true support. The main conclusions were that OSS and Proprietary Software essentially match in content quality until the codes become longer. In that case, Proprietary Software comes out on top.

Good article, Casey, thanks!

A comparison of some of the most widely-used content management systems.

Teaches you XML through examples and trying it yourself.

For those of you who wish to learn more about coding, this site is perfect. You can learn Java, Python, HTML and many other codes.

I found this helpful, tell me what yall think.

Yep, that's a pretty useful page. I probably should have taught y'all the term "DBMS" -- Database Management System." That's really what Oracle and MySQL and so on are.

just repost this because last time posted wrong. this article talks about some basic differences between Internet and Web.

We often use websites without realizing that they are viewed as projects to their founders and creators. This video gives some information about what going on behind the curtains of a blog-hosting website.

Great -- thanks for re-posting, Talia. Once we start using the site I created in class the other day, you'll get familiar with WordPress.

A nice, short, clear introduction to HTML, if you're interested in pursuing it further. Last revised 2005 -- even that long ago, most people weren't writing it by hand, but it continues to be useful to know how to do so if necessary.

History, development, and uses for Zotero

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

This is an article about the PostgreSQL development team has announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.3, the latest version of the world's leading open source relational database system.

Good link, Claire, and because it comes from Microsoft you can be pretty sure it's good info. Don't forget to comment on the link you share, though, with a brief evaluation of what you've shared. I'll give you credit this time, though.

Wikipedia's page on the different XML editors that are available.

Probably no one in the class will ever need to use an XML editor -- and in any case, really you can just use a plain text editor -- but thanks for finding it! Everyone I know who creates XML uses oXygen.

ICANN was offering the chance to buy the top-level domain of a Web address. One woman paid $185,000 to own the domain .wed. Now over 1,900 new Web names are going to be introduced.

Great article, Laura, and nice summary of it. Thanks!

This website has some more advanced URL tricks to make your YouTube experience better. Most of these tips are for embedding videos, but there are tips for viewing as well.

Anything that has the words "tips" or "tricks" in it, I like, even when it's not related to what we've been discussing lately. :)

Explains what is a browser, different types of browsers to try, and importance of updating browsers. His video that also explains browsers: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/what-is-browser.html

Huh, kind of interesting. At first I thought it was just going to tell me what browser I had, which seems silly. But you're right: the other stuff is useful. Thanks.

Gives you detailed definitions for any IT term.

Not a bad site at all, Emily -- thanks for finding it. I notice too that under "Learning Tools" there are various "Cheat Sheets" of things like a list of all two-letter TLD country codes. Could be useful.

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.

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.

Found this article about security measures. It's really interesting.

A very hot issue right now. "Security" is definitely one of the issues you can write about if you like.

Found this timeline of the internet to be interesting. It's fascinating to see how it got started and how it changed since it first began.

I didn't know that Queen Elizabeth was the first world leader to send an email ...