FURL virsus HTML

Furl v HTML

The Diigo is indeed a very powerful blog/sharing tool. It enables you to actively share your bookmarks with others in the group by:

• highlighting and adding sticky notes to the web page that remain when others access it


• organizing your bookmarks using tags and lists


• accessing the pages from any computer


• publishing your information to your blog

Alongside this the usual reference list (as with the one published as a HTML list) pales into insignificance. The latter are boring, difficult to read and only used by people with an urgent need to access these resources. It is static and must be redone each time. The FURL version builds a continuing, cooperative team effort.

Uses of blogs

Establishing support groups for people with specific needs*

(1.) Andrew Mahar (Radio Australia, 2009) established a group, InfoXchange, that collected and recycled old computers and supplied them to people in a large multi-storey housing estate in inner city Melbourne. He also established cheap access to the Internet for these people. He says "One of things about those communities is the things that often bind them are negative things; poor maintenance, bad security, drug and alcohol problems, family violence problems. Putting computers and the technology into those communities have given a great positive thing that connects them and binds those communities....They chat online together, they chat online with people outside of those communities." He goes on to report that "the communities there have over 30 different nationalities, so there are people who have come from all around the world and these people now are able to connect back in with their family and friends in the countries that they have come from as well."

(2.) These recycled computers are also being used by carers (at home) of chronically ill or disabled people. These people are usually severely stressed and poor in time and money, often unable to have any outside interaction. They are being encouraged to form support groups, using the Internet Chat sites, with other people coping with similar problems. Many such groups have been very successful in reducing the isolation and frustration of their existence.

* Published previously on the Discussion Board.

Experts in particular areas wishing to get a message across

The use by political parties to get their policies across to a different age group can be a legitimate pursuit. It is working well for Barak Obama but failed miserably for John Howard.

Citizen journalism

• Enables citizens to report some incidents that otherwise would go unreported due to censorship (like whistle-blowers but can be accomplished with anonymity if necessary)


• normal publications are constrained by guidelines and can be sued if they print or publish damaging or incorrect information


• Blog reporting is often published without these considerations. Hence, you need to:
  
  
  
  • check the truth of the information
  
  
  • check whether images have been modified or falsified
  
  
  • carefully analyse the interpretation and/or bias of any conclusions

ABC Radio Australia (2009) Connecting Poor Communities to the Internet: An innovative project to bring the internet to disadvantaged communities for the first time. Retrieved April 16, 2009, from http://www.abc.net.au/ra/innovations/stories/s2504762.htm

Copyright issues

Assessment of my website

My web page was a condensation of commands used in the PageTutor exercise (Barta, n.d.). As such it is in contravention of the Copyright Act. The United States information source (Copyright Website LLC, 2009) gives the four factors necessary to determined the degree of copying allowed.

Factor 1 - Purpose and Character of Use: I fit non-profit. (35%)

Factor 2 - Nature of Copyrighted Work: Is it worthy of copyright protection by it's nature? It is a widely used aid so the answer is "yes'. (10%)

Factor 3 - Relative amount: This is where it gets difficult. It appears the relative size does not matter, the quality of the quotation used is also of consideration (see below). (10%)

Factor 4 - Effect upon Potential Market: Will it harm the potential market of the original? Since Barta also publishes a book and similar guide I would say I fail this test. (35%)

I look bad enough under these guidelines. However, they then go on to say that "When a use is found to be transformative" the use part of the equation is not important and the transformation overrides all.

I have NOT published my page on the Internet.

Using the Curtin Logo on assignments

• The Australian Copyright Council states that the website as a whole is not protected but the logos, as a component part, may be


• IPAustralia defines Intellectual property as "the property of your mind or intellect". It distinguishes seven catagories: patents, trademarks, designs, copyright, circuit layout rights, plant breeded rights and confidentuality/trade secrets.
  
  
  
  • copyright: for "original material in literary, artistic, dramatic or musical works, films, broadcasts, multimedia and computer programs"
  
  
  • trademarks:for "letters, words, phrases, sounds, smells, shapes, logos, pictures, aspects of packaging or a combination of these, to distinguish the goods and services of one trader from those of another"
  
  
  • As the logo fits the trademark category it does not have the automatic protection in Australia that the copyright does. It must be registered. I checked the data base listed and the Curtin logo is a registered trademark.
  
  
  • It states that "An appropriate trade mark should be an integral part of the marketing strategy for your goods and services.The public will identify a certain quality and image with goods and services bearing your trade mark."
• While an exercise commissioned as part of a Curtin course (and flagged as such) seems to fit the profile it would appear that the University has the right to decide if your efforts, published under it's banner, would damage it's "quality and image".

Barta, J, (n.d.). So, you want to make a Web Page! Retrieved from http://www.PageTutor.com/ on April 3, 2009.
Copyright Website LLC (2009)>. Copyright Website. Retrieved from http://www.benedict.com/Info/FairUse/FairUse.aspx on April 14, 2009.
IPAustralia (2008). What is Intellectual Property? Retrieved from http://www.ipaustralia.gov.au/ip/index.shtml on April 18, 2009.

Five Most Important "Rules" when Writing for the Web

1. Write in an "Inverted Pyramid" (journalistic) style (Neilson, 1996)

• Important points (conclusion) first


• User's scan in an F-pattern and will only read in more detail if interested

2. Split information into "chunks" (Dartmouth, 2003)

• "use smaller, coherent pieces to avoid scrolling"

3. Use hypertext links to connect the pages (or "chunks")

• these links should indicate the information at the end


• A short summary along with the link is helpful

4. "Be concise"

• Use bulleted or ordered lists


• Use colour to distinguish important points

5. Consider the user's needs

• attach a .pdf printable version if the work is detailed and needs intense reading


• aim for quick downloading by small images and sparing use of multimedia

Jacob Neilsen (Neilsen, 1994) noted the following changes to his original findings:

• Web users scroll more


• Users want faster downloads


• Prefer a search option in each page/site

Neilsen, J (2008) Writing Style for Print vs. Web. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/print-vs-online-content.html
Neilsen, J (1996) Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9606.html
Morkes, J & Neilsen, J (1996) Applying Writing Guidelines to Web Pages. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.useit.com/papers/webwriting/rewriting.html
Dartmouth College (2003) Writing for the Web. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.dartmouth.edu/~webreach/articles/text.html
Neilsen, J (2008) Writing Style for Print vs. Web. Retrieved April 8, 2009, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/print-vs-online-content.html

Optional 'Standards' task 2

I checked my HTML page against the W3C Validator. This time I had only 25 errors at the start (my first ever page had 86). As before, I found that the best way to use this resource is to correct the first few mistakes and then re-validate. In my first page the 86 errors reduced to just 27 with the correction of one mistake. This is because missing a bracket or punctuation mark used in the code can cause cascading errors down the page - one missed bracket can make anything following wrong as it does not open or close correctly. Slow and cautious seems to be the best way to go.

The errors are all primarily the construction of the code.
- Have you put the correct document declaration at the top? I used the transitional XHTML version.
- I had missed a statement of the font type statement in the "header" ( charset=utf-8). The Validator assumed this but it seemed better to add it.
- I needed to decide a layout on paper first and then decide what needed to be added to the CSS file in the way of formatting (and check my CSS file).
- As I had decided to use the page to write a summary of the tutorials my main errors were sorting out what code needed to be written in directly (tags for italic text) and what code needed to be written in with special character code and "pre" tags so that the computer code was displayed on my page.

In summary, the main thrust of the validator is to correct code errors. These were involved with the display on the page.

HTML page construction and tutorial

Barta (n.d.) has produced an excellent summary of HTML. Working through it revised a lot of terms and ideas. I have recommended it to one person in this field already. I still haven't mastered Photoshop so my heading is a patch of two images and a title instead of a background image and layered heading. I will have to work on that further. I was not sure what to do about the CSS sheet and HTML code so will try to post it to the web site allocated. Otherwise I will probably add it to blogger later on.

Writing code to appear on a screen, inside an HTML document, proved tricky as I had to distinguish between the code used to format the document and the publishing of the code (requiring special character encoding and the use of "pre" tags).

Writing HTML code has become easier but still proves very tricky. The smallest error can have drastic consequences. It seems that there are not only three versions of HTML but also two versions of CSS. It also seems that not all browsers read all of the new code correctly. (Powell, 2003)explains the code but then provides a detailed list of which browsers will recognize it. This makes constructing a web page a more difficult proposition than it should otherwise be. You would need to try your page in all types of browsers and resolutions if you are producing a commercial version. This also fails to recognize the miniaturization of web browsers in mobile phones and new smaller laptops with their reduced resolution (Neilson,2009).

Blogging seems to be a wysiwyg site where the HTML code is produced for you. However, like many of these programs it often produces errors in the blog unless you understand what is happening and can correct it (or press a lot of buttons in order to find the methods in the blog site e.g. text wrap when adding images to blogger.com). It has a different purpose - to allow people with no knowledge of HTML to produce a web page easily. The web page we constructed was intended for a more permanent display (usually) with the consequent problems of both your own description and search engine automatic allocation of meta-data.


Barta, J. (n.d.) So, you want to make a Web Page. Retrieved April 2, 2009 from PageTutor.com
Neilson, J.(2009) Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998. Retrieved April 8, 2009 from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
Powell, T. (2003) The Complete Reference: HTML & XHTML. Emeryville, McGraw-Hill/Osborne.