Bob Stepno's Red Liner

That question from a writers’ group e-mail list was just what I needed
to inspire me to try explaining RSS syndication to newcomers to the
blogging world.

This will seem terribly over-simplified to Berkman folks, but I came up with three main issues:

• delivery (you go to blogs; RSS feeds come to you)
• contents (RSS feeds can be headlines, summaries or more)
• reading tools (desktop and Web-based aggregators)

The essay-page
that grew out of my e-mail reply probably skates onto its thinnest ice
in the section headed “More technical info and abbreviations than you
need…”

I welcome corrections and suggestions, either as comments or e-mail.
Feel free to dope-slap me and just say, “Why didn’t you send them
here?” (Adding the address of a page that does the job better.) I’m a
glutton for punishment.

‘What’s the difference between blogs and RSS?’ …

In response to a question from one of our new bloggers from Andrew Grumet’s MIT class, here are some tips about putting images in your blog.

What are TITLE and TEXT?
PICTURES is one of the items on the horizontal menu at the top of a
Manila editing screen. When you upload your image with its “Create a
New Picture” command, you get a fill-in form with room to give the
picture a TITLE and add some TEXT. Those headings might suggest you are
writing a title and caption to appear under the picture, but that isn’t
the case.

“TITLE”
is a shortcut name you can use to add the picture to your blog. Just
type the title in quotes wherever you want the picture to appear. Make
it short and easy to remember. BeardedBob, for example.

“TEXT” is an alternative text, intended to appear
in place of the picture if someone views your page with a text-only
browser. (Some browsers also will display the “alt text” until the
picture is delivered to the page, or when you pass the mouse over it.)
Example: “Bob’s mugshot shows his beard in need of a trim.” An “alt”
text is more important if the picture contains important information,
such as a graph with numbers that aren’t repeated in the text of the
page.

Here’s an example of the HTML code my shortcut TITLE
inserts in the page, including the address where the actual picture
file is stored, its measurements and the “alt text”:
Making text wrap around pictures

If I had simply typed Bearded Bob in quotes, that code would have been
inserted, and the picture would appear on a line all by itself again.
However, I wanted the text to wrap to the right of the picture, like
this. To get that effect, I had to edit the HTML code a little. Adding
an alignment command (align=”left” or align=”right”) to the
image-position code will do the trick. Align left will push the image
to the left, like my photo. Here’s what the code looks like:
You can do fancier
arrangements of text and picture elements with XML or HTML paragraph
and table codes, which are easiest to manipulate with webpage editors
like Dreamweaver, then paste into a Manila editing window.

Note:
Changing the height or width measurements in an image code will distort
the shape of the picture. Putting a number other than 0 in the “border”
code will give you a black border, measured in pixels. Here’s a
400-pixel wide, 100-pixel high mashed example with a 10 pixel border,
anticipating any “how big is a pixel?” questions in the next section.

How Big? How Many?
Let your audience be your guide. If some of your readers have old,
small 640-pixel-wide monitors or don’t like to fill the screen with the
browser, smaller is better. If your blog’s margins and menus eat a
third of that small browser window, then a 400-pixel-wide picture might
be a good limit. A picture half that wide would give you room to wrap
text alongside.

On-screen size is only part of the story. Readers with slow modem connections will appreciate your limiting the number and file
size of pictures, too. Crop out unessential details and use Photoshop’s
“Save for Web” feature or some similar feature in another program to
compress the file. A compressed JPG image can save as much as 98
percent of the load time required for a “print quality” digital camera
photo, without hurting picture quality. (That’s because the computer
screen shows fewer than 100 dots per inch, while common printers show
three to six times that.)

Examine the file size of any image
before you upload it. Most images can be cropped and compressed to
under 50 KB. (Typical photos on the New York Times, Boston.com or CNN
home pages are 20 KB or less; thumbnails, 4 to 8 KB. Even with so many
menus, ads and images, these news sites’ whole home pages usually
“weigh” less than 500KB.)

If you are going to use images in your
weblog very often, you should have a copy of Photoshop, PaintShop Pro,
The Gimp, Fireworks or another image editing program and learn how to
rotate, crop, resize, and compress (“Save for Web”) pictures. Google
can find you plenty of tutorials on the subject… or drop me a line.

Picture tips for new bloggers …

Here are a few tips for newcomers to blogging, particularly those being
introduced to Berkman’s Manila system at our MIT blog orientation sessions this month.

Writing style: It’s your voice, and your choice. For some bloggers, every item is a long essay. Many others
favor a “bits and pieces” or “news briefs” style — maybe several posts
a day, almost all short items of a paragraph or two. Some think that’s what blogging is all about.

Long & short of it: Here’s a compromise.
Post a
first paragraph or summary to the weblog, with the word “more” or a subhead at the
end. Link that and the main headline to the full story. In
Manila or Radio, the long version can be saved  using the
“Stories”
button on the editing menu. My About Weblogs
page is a “story” I update now and then, rather than a daily blog item. So is my essay about RSS Aggregators, which are another way that people read blog contents and news. You also could link to a
separate webpage on any other server where you have permission. See my New Year item, then click on the flag to go to a photo page.

Linkage. Reading a paragraph with a lot of links like that last one may take some getting
used to. The color link words look enough like bold-emphasized
words to  jump out at readers and interfere with reading comprehension,
as well as inviting people to click, fly to a new page, and lose the
train of thought. I probably should moderate my own inclination to such
hypertextuality. (If you know of any great research on this subject, pro or con, please leave a comment below!)

Writing in the browser. Always “select all text” and copy your new content to the
clipboard before you hit “post.” If something goes wrong, you can just
start a new item, paste back the content, and try again. Also,  remember to both “Post” and “Publish” your blog items.

Copying text to a blog
from a word processor or browser: Watch for “curly quotes” and special
characters. They may not translate properly when controlled by the
blog’s template or style sheet. Check your finished pages in more than
one browser to see if there are unwanted changes in fonts, headings,
lists, paragraphs, etc.
(Be careful if you cut and paste more than small chunks of text.
Javascript code hidden behind a Web page could come along for the ride.
An accidentally-copied script we saw in class last week made text
appear in the margins of the Weblog page. It even obscured the location
of the Edit and View HTML buttons, making it hard to go back and delete
the bad code. Jessica saved the day, though, by finding the invisible  buttons with a wave of her mouse.)

Writing tips for new bloggers …

(Updated Jan. 28) Andrew Grumet and friends (myself included) helped launch a batch of new MIT bloggers this week…

• Sandra
• Molly
• Cecilia
• Tahsin
• Bill
• Patricia
• Jonathan
• Jazy
• Jina

Here’s the mailing list for the Berkman Thursday night blog meetings, for members of the group who said they might stop in.

I had fun being part of the team. The questions (and an occassional
glitch) helped me figure out things about this Manila weblog system
that I hadn’t tried before. I’ve included things I just learned and
some things I already knew in these pages:

• Blog-writing tips
• Blog picture tips
• Notes about RSS syndication
• A MIT-centric weblog history that I mentioned in class.

For good measure, here are:

Andrew’s homepage…

My main weblog…

Jessica’s weblog…

And the Dowbrigade blog from Michael, whose instructions we used in class.

New Bloggers at MIT …

I didn’t notice when the Poynter Institute for Media Studies pointed the top level of its blog site “poynter.blogs.com” to its political-coverage blog called “Stump,” but today it’s blogging about blogging. in particular the Daily Kos coverage in Iowa.

“In general, though, it looks like this campaign will be an excellent glimpse at how blogs may influence or practice journalism,” says Poynter’s Matt Thompson. The fact that professional journalism organizations like Poynter are exploring the blog format says a lot.

More

Journalism Institutes Blog the Campaign …

While I was playing doorman for the MIT folks coming in out of the 1 degree cold to our blogging class tonight, a catchy old tune kept running through my head…

Then I realized what the song itself was, “The Frozen Logger.”

So far I’ve written one (obvious) letter to launch a parody that
anyone reading this is welcome to complete… Just add a “b”to
“logger…” and you’re on your way.

Considering the coffee mug symbol on RSS feeds, all we need is an
icy thumb to make some “no one but a blogger stirs his coffee with his
thumb…” variation.

Anyhow, the Thursday Harvard blogging meeting and those of us who
had been off evangelizing MIT, were reunited in the warm basement of a
Mexican restaurant (with Steve’s phonecam)… while the temperature dropped to two degrees
below zero outside…

Boston.com’s weather corner says the 24 mph wind gives a “real feel temp” of 34 below. Time to button up our vests… (Incidentally, thanks to the Grateful Dead, who never really did the song, here’s what appears to be the original lyric, complete with six-foot-seven waitress.)

PS Please do check out the mostly-folksongs “Digital Tradition” lyrics database at Mudcat.org The keyword lyric search can be quite surprising when used with terms like “Harvard,” “MIT” or “computer” or “bawdy” or…

Singing while blogging… …

Somerville, the city Bostonians see as slightly to the right of Cambridge, marks the first day of the year with some unique flag-waving… which gave me a chance to “cover” a local community event in my own backyard, as well as to experiment with links between weblogs and pictures on my home page. Some sadly misinformed people think the “First Flag” actually flew over neighboring Cambridge, according to one speaker at Thursday’s event. But after Bunker Hill was captured, Prospect Hill (then in Charlestown, now Somerville) was the next line of defense, and the line held through the siege of Boston into the first dawn of 1776. So let Boston have its “First Night” — Somerville seemed pretty happy with its annual morning after.  Follow the link for the history of the flag and more pictures…

Happy New Year from Somerville …

   Just when I thought I’d fought off the temptation to look
at more software, Mark Bernstein has a new OS-X release of Tinderbox,
a hypertext program I bought a couple of years ago and never found time
to explore thoroughly. I liked its approach to handling “messy
information” through a variety of views — a graphical map, outlines,
linked folders and more. I thought I might use it to sort out fieldwork
notes, especially if I made major revisions to my dissertation or a
follow-up study.
   Now more people are using Tinderbox for weblogs, and some are doing things with content categories or, as another Bob puts it, “thematic content.”
   At the same time, I’ve been planning to add a taxonomy or category system to my own main Radio weblog
to make it more useful as an archive for class lecture notes… so I
guess I’ll be taking another look at Tinderbox, which also exports to
Radio.
  For now, I’m using this Harvard blog for notes related to our Thursday meeting topics (blogging tools, politics), and using my Radio blog for notes that I might mine and link to lectures or assignments in some future teaching job. But I’ve been very sloppy about it. For a while I was thinking the Harvard blog could consist of brief versions of entries from the other blog — a low-tech, but too-high-maintenance way of giving RSS subscribers a choice of how much content to see in their aggregators. I’d still like to offer that kind of choice, but there must be a better way…

Tinderbox and Categories …

A friend on an SPJ mailing list
writes, “Today, Dec. 15, is the 212th anniversary of the Bill
of Rights. I haven’t seen any signs of public celebrations (though
there certainly should be!) but the day will certainly be honored here
in my office. Are any of you doing anything special to mark this day?”

Inspired, I decided to celebrate Bill of Rights Day this way:

1. Go to http://WhiteHouse.gov
2. Search for “Bill of Rights Day”
3. Get a list that begins:

4. Click on first item and get this press release:

5. Repeat test.

6. Repeat word “Huh?”

7. Settle for earlier proclamations:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/12/20031212-6.html

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021209-10.html

I do see one celebration after a quick Web search… but it isn’t
making huge headlines amid the liberal-bashing. Still, the New Yorker
probably will cover it…

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=14572&c=206

The president did mention the topic of “rights” at his press conference this  morning (I just skimmed the transcript):

At The Times
I thought I’d find a Bill of Rights theme or two at The New York
Times “Learning Network” for school teachers, but it is all Saddam
today… For a “historic front page” the
“On this day…” section uses the Battle of Verdun, followed
by the birth of J.Paul Getty and a Harper’s Weekly cartoon about press speculation on President Benjamin
Harrison’s cabinet. However, passage of the Bill of Rights heads a fascinating chronology under “On this date…”

Quite a day for various freedoms, actually!

Elsewhere, The Times education site did have a “bill of rights” related lesson plan online from 1999 and several specifically related to the First Amendment.

And here are few interesting Bill of Rights posts found by Google:

The document itself at the National Archives
http://www.archives.gov/national_archives_experience/bill_of_rights.html

and at the Library of Congress
http://memory.loc.gov/const/bor.html

The Bill of Rights Institute
http://www.billofrightsinstitute.org/

Bill of Rights Day Dotcom?
http://billofrightsday.com/

Loveland, Colorado, observes the day:
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1030004/posts

One national park…

http://www.nps.gov/sapa/pphtml/eventdetail5999.html

This site has a link that says it goes to  other Bill of Rights
blog entries, but also mentions some technical problems today:

http://expatsagainstbush.typepad.com/home/2003/11/bill_of_rights__1.html

Happy Bill of Rights Day …

Audience members at the Nieman Foundation Narrative Journalism Conference were invited to blog their reactions to last weekend’s three-day conference. The Web crew from the Poynter Institute put together a category system with pull-down menus that cross-reference the blog entries…

Not as extensive as ScriptingNews’ new category system, but useful. For example, one entry about David Halberstam‘s talk is tagged to the “crime & law” category, although it wasn’t the major theme in his talk — but someone intrigued by his comments could follow the link to discussions of other police-beat presentations at the conference.

The post-conference blogging hasn’t really taken off, but then this was a conference for folks who (a) probably like to write long and (b) like to get paid for the stuff they write.

New top-level blog entries require authorization from Poynter (either that or I haven’t figured out how to create one), but the “comment” system is open, for better or for worse.

Example: One of the top-level entries, about the closing talk by the New Yorker‘s Susan Orlean, was a rambling jumble of description and metaphors that seemed as inspired by Orlean’s looks as her words. (Looks aren’t the point. Orlean herself once described a guy as

“…sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth… has the posture of al-dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who plays a lot of video games.”

[source])

Was her commenter in awe, star-struck, flirting, being satirical, or just playing with the weblog system after having a few drinks at the Hyatt? I don’t know, but I still think it was rude for someone to add a one-liner that said “This is a piece of crap.”

OK, it wasn’t exactly clear where the original comment was going, especially since Nieman and Poynter don’t post “official” summaries of the original presentations. (They do sell audio tapes.)

However, as another poster pointed out, also inspired by Ms. Orlean, “finding your writerly voice involves a lot of self-editing.”

That’s not always the case in the shoot-from-the hip world of blogs, which may be why I’m not a daily blogger.

Narrative Journalism Conference Weblog …