Tag Archives: how to

February 25, 2013, 8:00 am

Host a Website on Google Drive

Google-Drive Last month, Mark showed us how to use Google Drive to host a continuously-updating archive of a Twitter account. Doing so means taking advantage of a new Google Drive feature, “site publishing.”

Now, maybe I just hadn’t had enough coffee when I was working on implementing “site publishing,” but it seems to me that the instructions provided by Google are not as helpful as they could be. It’s actually pretty easy, so I put together what may be an excessively detailed, step-by-step guide for under-caffeinated people like me. (This guide assumes you already have some HTML content you’d like to publish. And, as always, be mindful of the stability and security–or lack thereof–in the cloud. )

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February 12, 2013, 11:00 am

A Beginner’s Guide to HTML, part 1

By George Williams

If you don’t already understand the markup language known as HTML, there’s not necessarily a compelling reason for you to learn. However, if you’d like a better idea of how web pages work, then it’s worth taking some time to understand the underlying concepts. In today’s post, and the ones that follow in this series, I’m going to introduce the basics of how to create HTML documents.

Of course, here at ProfHacker, we’ve published on topics related to this. Julie offered “a pleasant little chat about XML.” Lincoln provided an informative post about Markdown, which is a user-friendly “syntax invented by John Gruber for marking up plain text.” Mark discussed “writing in Markdown with Gonzo,” a free open-source editor. I explained “how to get clean HTML from Microsoft Word documents.” Amy considered why you might want to use an HTML editor and introduced us to Mozilla Thimble.

What we…

June 14, 2012, 11:00 am

Checking Your Facebook Privacy (Again)

By Brian Croxall

Last spring, I wrote a post outlining six steps for checking your Facebook privacy. These steps were developed during workshops that I had been teaching faculty and students at Emory on creating an academic web presence. While I (and most everyone here at ProfHacker) would suggest that sharing your work and being find-able on the web can have a salutory effect on your career (especially when you’re on the job market), not everyone feels that way–and especially about Facebook, where you likely have connected with friends and family who aren’t related to your daily work.

One of the tricky things about managing your Facebook privacy is that there are so many different choices to make. The service allows you granular control over almost everything you’re willing to share, but that also means you’re going have to make many, many choices. The other thing that is tricky about…

June 6, 2011, 12:00 pm

Technology 101: The Basics No One Tells You

By George Williams

I’ve just returned from THATCamp 2011, and my head is spinning with all of the new things I’ve learned, the new people I’ve met, and the projects I’ve learned about.

One of the most rewarding things for me of a THATCamp experience is the generosity of spirit people show and the clarity of the explanations they provide for how to accomplish various tasks. Thanks to Jeremy Boggs–to name one example among many–several of us now know a good bit more than we did before about HTML5 & CSS3 as well as the process of creating my own WordPress themes from scratch. Often all we need is someone to show us the basics, to help us avoid all of the unproductive flailing around that might occur before we finally figure out how something is supposed to work.

While we all wait impatiently for the next THATCamp to take place somewhere nearby, there are a couple of resources to consider for ourselves…

February 7, 2011, 8:00 am

Six Steps for Checking Your Facebook Privacy

By Brian Croxall

Last semester, I began teaching a new workshop in Emory’s library called “Facebook, Privacy, and Online Identity.” The goal of the workshop was to help students become aware of how much they share on Facebook and to help them make conscious decisions about what they would share. I know that students, as well as almost everyone on the planet, have become more aware of The Social Network’s privacy issues due their policy changes in late 2009 and early 2010, as well as the media coverage that these changes drew. For this reason, I expected that the workshops would draw a large number of students. I was wrong. Over a total of four workshops, I had a total of four students come through.

I’m working on doing better marketing for this semester’s workshops, but I was pleased to see that all four of the students who attended the workshops were flabbergasted at how much information they had been …