How To: Creating A Link In Word Press

21 February 2007 at 4:17 pm (How-Tos - WP) (, )

(1) Log in to your WordPress blog

(2) Review these instructions from WordPress

(3) Watch this Quicktime Movie - From UW or watch the YouTube clip (smaller screen size)

That’s all there is to it!

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Broadband: US Continues To Lag The World

21 February 2007 at 3:16 pm (Economics, Statistics) (, , )

Information Week has an update on the state of broadband connectivity in the US, relative to the rest of the world. Some highlights:

  • Broadband growth rates are much higher in other countries
  • OECD: the US is 12th in broadband adoption rates
  • ITU: the US is 21st in broadband penetration rates
  • We pay more for less

Thankfully, the reporter included criticism of the rosy FCC report from July 2005. That report defined “broadband” as 200 Kbps in at least one direction and considered a zip code to have 100% penetration if it had only one active broadband line. This is inflating the data.

But why is 200 Kbps a bad measure of “broadband”? From InfoWeek:

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Help Evaluate Congressional Web Sites

20 February 2007 at 11:25 pm (Electronic Democracy, Social Networks, Web/Tech)

Have an extra 10 minutes to spare? Consider helping the Sunlight Foundation conduct a review of Congressional web sites. It’s easy (if the web site is logically organized) and informative (I discovered some unknown-to-me info that Congressmen have to disclose).

One potential flaw: it looks like each web site will be reviewed by only one person, which could introduce error. For example, I marked one question incorrectly on Part 1 of the survey — but was able to correct it when I ran across that bit of information later in my search of the web site. What if I had not done so (either found the info or figured out how to make the correction)? The Congressional web site would have received an erroneously low score, because of a coding error.

Nevertheless, it’s an interesting application of the distributed labor / open-source software model. In an earlier project, the Foundation tracked 1753 of the  1810 earmarks in the House Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations Bill and 477 of 553 earmarks in the Housing and Urban Development Bill.

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Free Conference Calls

15 February 2007 at 2:16 pm (Convergence, Economics, Web/Tech)

Foonz Logo

The latest twist on internet disruption of telephony is a free online conference calling service called Foonz.com. Create an account and then you can organize a conference (group) call by having Foonz alert the participants (invitees) by e-mail, IM, or text message to a cellphone.

Once you create an account, you’ll get a phone number to call to set up your group call. Each person on the call phones in to a central number, just like a regular telephone conference call. Foonz links the calls.

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Frankly My Dear, I Need a DAM

10 February 2007 at 1:04 am (Convergence, Personal Technology, Teaching)

An Introduction to Digital Asset Management
Learn how to determine your DAM needs, requirements, and budget, analyze a range of software solutions and explore the world of “meta-data,” which is how we make non-textual files searchable.
The first in a series of three digital media workshops offered by the UW Dept of Communication.

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Creative Commons

8 February 2007 at 5:23 pm (How-Tos - UW) (, )

Students are also required to create a “course page” that has information about their class project and the article that they bring to class when it’s their turn to lead discussion.

Here’s what your Creative Commons license — published on your course page –  might look like:

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

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Truth In Advertising: Not

7 February 2007 at 8:31 pm (Convergence, Media)

I’ve threatened to do this before … but I’ve finally hit my breaking point. Letter to the FCC to follow … I’m tired of cable stations not honoring their published schedules!

TVLand is the latest culprit. We discovered that they have oldies like M*A*S*H, All In The Family (which I appreciate more as an adult than I did when it was "live"), even Bonanza. So we set up a RePlay channel for M*A*S*H (we’d just watched the movie on Netflix - that’s how we found the TVLand site).

Three times in a row, we’ve sat down to watch M*A*S*H … and discovered that RePlay recorded 10 minutes or so of Sanford and Son before M*A*S*H kicked in. This doesn’t mean RePlay is screwed up — it starts recording when the network says it’s gonna start the show.

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How To: Uploading An Image In WP

6 February 2007 at 2:08 pm (How-Tos - WP) (, , )

Note: WP changed the interface in Mar 2008. These screenshots are no longer accurate for WordPress.com but are for an earlier installed version of WP. When I’ve updated this, I’ll link to it here.

This post is “how to” insert an image into a WordPress blog post.

First, if the image is not yet hosted on a webserver somewhere, you need to upload it to WordPress or to an image hosting site such as Flickr or PhotoBucket.

The “upload to WordPress” is easy — look at the bottom of your blog post window: there is an “upload” tab. Browse your harddrive and find your image (this is web-based FTP). Be sure your cursor is where you want the image to appear when you do this step! [Note: you have only 50 MB 3 GB of free space at WordPress -- if you're going to use images frequently, you'll want to host them on an external website.] Read the rest of this entry »

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Tribune Chain Expands Community Building

5 February 2007 at 11:40 pm (Media, Social Networks) (, )

ClickZ reports on newspaper website efforts to foster community, encourage “socializing.” Tribune Interactive is partnering with VMix Medial; the article provides some specific examples of community-building.

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Oh. Good. Grief.

5 February 2007 at 9:36 pm (Web/Tech)

Chalk this up to my ignoring the SuperBowl (except for the Frito Lay commercials) … but I just found out that the Dolphin’s website — the SuperBowl host site — was hacked last week. (tip, tip) "The attackers are exploiting flaws patched in Microsoft’s MS06-014 and MS07-004 bulletins." Hello??

Who found it? External security guys, of course.

From Online Security Authority: "The file downloaded in the attack is a keystroke logger and a remote control tool, also called a backdoor, Websense said. Attackers get full access to the compromised PC."

The website runs MSIIS and Windows 2000, according to Netcraft.

Do people even think about crisis planning/prevention anymore?

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