Sponsors Summer 2009

The following is a list of sponsors for this blog:

1. Canada Summer Jobs
2. FACTS
3. Centralta Tourism Society
4. Collaborative Information Networks

Blogging made easy @ mytelus.com

*Blogging made easy

By now, you probably know that the term 'blog' is short for weblog, a personal journal on the Web. Blogs cover as wide a range of topics and opinions as there are people writing them. Some are influential and have a large readership, while others are intended for family and friends.

A blog is a lot like an online journal or diary. The author can talk about anything and everything. Many blogs are full of interesting links that the author has found, as well as stories or bits of information he or she finds interesting.

Blogging basics
One of the great things about blogs is their simplicity. Instead of a traditional website consisting of a home page with links to sub-pages, a typical blog normally contains a single page of entries, with older entries archived.

Each blog entry is a text blurb that may contain embedded links to other sites, news stories or YouTube videos, for example. When the author adds a new entry, it goes at the top, pushing all the older entries down. A right sidebar usually contains additional permanent links to other sites and stories.

Online tools
Today, there are many web-based tools available to help you easily create and manage your blog. Among the most popular are Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, and LiveJournal. Most allow you to create basic blogs for free, and add additional features for a small price.

There is also software (such as Movable Type**) that can help you create and self-publish your blog with even more customization. Plus, many blogging tools also allow you to post photos, video, and audio files. You can even post via your mobile phone.

Getting started
Creating a simple blog using web-based tools only takes a few minutes. Start by entering your name, email address and other basic information. Then choose your blog's 'look' from a selection of standard templates. A few clicks and you're ready to start adding new blog entries.

To add an entry, start a new post. You can edit the entry as much as you like by clicking the 'edit' button. When you are happy with it, click the 'publish' button to make the new entry visible on your public blog. In fact, with today's blogging tools making it so easy to express yourself online, the only challenge facing you is likely to be deciding what to blog about.

Your blog can be as simple or as complex as you like. It's all up to you.

*Article from here.

**This leads to MovableType.org but perhaps should lead to MovableType.com. The .org site is a professional development tool while the .com is a publishing tool.

RSS Feeds

Blogger has a number of different gadgets that you can add to view RSS feeds. A gadget called, "Tabbed RSS Reader" can read a number of feeds at the same time which the user can specify.

If you want to view RSS feeds from your home computer, you will need to download an RSS feed reader. By default, Vista has one installed into the sidebar. For more information on picking an RSS Client to suite your needs, click here.

Google has its own service called Google Reader. It can be used to receive up to date news using RSS feeds.

Blogger and EduBlog Comparison

Edublogs has some cool features that are easy to use, such as being able to password protect specific blog posts. Another nice thing is that there are a lot of different blog templates. The extra widgets (gadgets) that they have are useful for a basic blog, but lack the functionality of blogger. One of the major problems with Edublogs is its ads that can get in the way. Some of the features are only available to "Supporters", which you would have to pay for. There is also an upload limit of 20MB, so if there are a lot of pictures being uploaded space might be lost too quickly.

Overall I would say that this blogging system would be fine for Elementary students, but for anyone above that level I think that blogger is far superior.

File Hosting Services

There are a number of free online file hosting services which would be useful for putting up files like .pdf and .ppt files. Most of these sites do not have great navigational or guarantees of file protection. Google does not have its own file hosting service, however many people use Google Pages (or more recently Google Sites) to host their files for free. There is 100MB of space available.

This website has a bunch of free file hosting websites. Most of them (probably all of them) require that you create an account with an e-mail address and their privacy policies can be a little ambiguous as to ownership of materials, guarantees and reliability. It would be best if we would host only non-copyrighted material, or material that is meant to be spread around without consequence.

Information about hosting files on blogger or other Google services can be found here.

Secure FTP severs:

Some files require a more secure setting (copyrighted files or other sensitive information) and thus would not be well uploaded onto a regular file hosting site. These types of files my require a Secure FTP sever to host these files. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol" and is used to send files over a network. FTP servers generally require more maintenance than web based file hosting in order to keep the server running and ensure its security. For a list of free FTP Servers click here, and for some FTP server tutorials click here.

Social Networks

As technology advances we are always on the lookout for how we can keep current with what's popular to provide the most integrative and up to date experiences possible. Online social networks have become increasingly popular in the last five years, and as such many sites and organizations are expanding their user base with more and more features. The following is an ongoing look at various technologies and how they can be implemented with the Blog system we are using.

Facebook:
Facebook has launched a program called Facebook Connect. This has been designed so that websites that use networking (registration, forums, etc.) can link their account with their Facebook accounts. Many sites have already implemented this program such as CNET. Facebook is implementable with Blogger, however complex. At this time it would only be implementable if we were using our own domain (as opposed to the Blogger free domain) because it involves hosting custom site files and code.

Twitter:
Twitter is implementable with Blogger. There is a gadget that can connect your blog and Twitter account so that you can view your Tweets on your blog as they update (see FACTS Summer 09). The Twitter gadget seems to increase the page load time so it might not be useful when optimizing for slower computers. Twitter has a 140 character limit so it is unlikely that updating your twitter account from your blog would be beneficial.

Myspace:
Myspace is currently not implementable as a social network beyond their own domain, but they are rolling out a service called MySpaceID at some point this year.

Skype:
Skype is a communication system used by many business' and people for personal use. It has its share of features and limitations that makes it stand out in the digital communication market. There is a gadget to allow Skype-Blogger connectivity called Web Skype, but for the moment is only implementable with Microsoft Internet Explorer and thus may be limited in its use.*

*IE has ~40% of the current market share whereas Firefox is ~47%