webpres2005

Blogging beyond text: Adding sounds and photos

What I'd like to do in this session is explain how I have developed my idea of creating web portals in Buzznet, the advantages I find in doing it that way, and how I embed HTML code in the text I post in order to create the links and make such sites act as a portal.

In presenting this material, I intend to make use of the Web Tour feature in Elluminate, and also use the whiteboard to write out code. The most important bit of code is the A HREF> tag, and its syntax is

<A HREF="http://www.vancestevens.com">Hello World/A>

(where you see Hello World on your screen, and when you click on it, the browser roams to the URL given in parentheses)

I will start by mentioning how I got the idea. It was during a workshop I was giving in Tunisia. I had just returned from a trip to China where I found my usual blogging tools blocked, and Bee suggested I try Buzznet. That worked, so I kept a journal in Buzznet and populated it with pictures taken from my digital camera. This my first Buzznet journal is here: http://vancestevens.buzznet.com/user/?id=353025

There's something to notice about this url. It's the direct link to one of the pictures in my 'gallery' which I decided you should see first as your introduction to my brief photoblog. It shows you a picture of Yangsuo on a sunny day. Yangsuo was one of the most pleasant and visitor-friendly towns I have visited in China. If I had given you the generic address of my blog, http://vancestevens.buzznet.com/ it would have taken you to the last picture I had put there.

So as a web master, you have a choice here.

1. You can give out the generic address of your Buzznet blog and people will enter it at your most recent posting, or ...
2. you can give a fixed address which takes your friends to a specific entry point.

We'll see that you can design this specific entry point so that visitors can link from here to where you want them to go. In a few moments, I'll be showing you how, and giving some examples.

For example, in the blog I've just shown you, there is a link to some 40 more photos I took around Yangsuo. I uploaded these photos to http://www.ofoto.com. To do that I simply started a free account there and then loaded in the photos. In the last step of the upload, I was asked to invite someone to view my photos. I invited myself, being careful here to check the box that does NOT require visitors to register first with Ofoto. Then when I got my invitation in my email, I converted the long unwieldy string into a Tiny URL and put that link in my blog. In this way, you in effect invite EVERYONE to view your photos, which you see when you click on the link. And it's all free.

So I had just started playing with this when I went in the latter part of the summer to Tunisia to give workshops on teaching online. http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tunisia2004/mahdia.htm

The Tunisians weren't very clear on what they meant for me to teach so I decided that teaching online included training in making blogs, and one of the blogging tools I used there was Buzznet. My course was an at times uphill battle to get the participants working as a community of learners, which meant we took a lot of pictures and started web portals and encouraged everyone to display their creativity online. It wasn't until the second week of that course that I hit on the idea of using Buzznet to give each member of the community a unique identity with other links to that person's projects.

Here are the second week participants: http://www.homestead.com/prosites-vstevens/files/efi/papers/tunisia2004/mahdia_wk2.htm

and here's the Buzznet portal I created during the session to introduce the participants: http://mahdia2004.buzznet.com/

One participant who has continued to stay in touch and who has been developing his blogs since then using the techniques he learned in this session is Mokhtar, http://mahdia2004.buzznet.com/user/?id=458296 . You can visit his blogs and see what I mean if you like.

Ok, so you can see from this simple and tentative example how a Buzznet blog can be used as a portal, and by 'portal' I mean an entry point to a class or a community. It is possible with such a portal to display pictures of members of the community and as annotations to those pictures, give links to more information about community members.

There are disadvantages to this approach, the main one being that community members themselves can't upload information to their own main entries, although anyone can leave a comment, and the comments can include HTML code. Some huge advantages of this approach are:

1. it's free, except for the cost of the Internet connection
2. It requires no special software apart from a browser and for composing postings, perhaps a notepad (an HTML editor helps, but is not necessary)
3. It allows a moderator to manage a class easily from anywhere, even from a public cybercafe

I tested this last contention recently when I started my own EVOnline session on Webpresence. When the course started I happened to be on holiday. With Buzznet I didn't see this as a problem. I had already set up a static course portal somewhere, and built some materials into a Moodle. I started a YahooGroup and asked participants to upload photos there. Then while traveling, I visited the group's photo areas and downloaded any new photos I found to the computer I happened to be on. From there I uploaded them to my Buzznet blog for my Webpresence session. Here it is:

http://webpres2005.buzznet.com/

What do you think?

At the generic address (in each recent posting, that is) I built in a link back to the main page in the blog: http://webpres2005.buzznet.com/user/?id=776980

and here you'll find links to all the other components in the course.

OK, now that you see how useful it is to put links in a Buzznet blog, let me show you how it's done.

First of all, if you're going to write in HTML, it helps if you put all your paragraphs inside of p> tags. By the way, usually when you open a tag in HTML you close it later with a slash tag like so /p> (upper lower case in tags doesn't matter).

So if you're posting in HTML, put all your paragraphs inside these <p>Paragraph here</p> 'parentheses' or <P>ackages, or <P>aragraphs if you prefer.

To make any link work you simply write it in this format:

<A HREF="http://www.vancestevens.com">Hello World</A>

That's an A HREF tag which equals the URL in parentheses, and between the close of the first part of the tag (and its argument, the URL) whatever you write there will be displayed on the screen up to the close of the tag</A>. And what is displayed between the >and the</A> can be clicked on.

You can use this syntax all over your blogs. You can use it in postings and in comments and in other areas where you have control over what you write in blogs.

So now I'm going to do something slightly clever. I'm going to create a title to this page in PowerPoint, do a screen shot of it, upload it as the latest post in my Buzznet blog, and then paste in the text I'm writing now in Front Page. Since I'm writing it in WYSIWYG (design) view in FP, there is also a code view. I'm going to copy the code view and paste it here.

Enjoy reading my presentation,

Vance