Tag Archives: web sites

March 5, 2013, 8:00 am

Easy Timelines with Timeline JS

It seems a lot of us here at ProfHacker find timelines useful for teaching purposes. Ethan’s covered BeeDocs Timeline, Konrad’s had a look at TimelineSetter, and Billie’s introduced readers to a variety of timeline tools for PC users. Brian’s written an entire tutorial on building a timeline using SIMILE. I’ve even covered timelines myself, taking a look at Dipity a couple of years ago. (And I’m happy to report that Dipity can now handle BCE dates.)

Recently, I’ve had reason to be looking for a timeline tool again, for use in a group project for class. My teammates and I settled on a new (to us, at least) tool that we learned about after searching around for a bit: Timeline JS.

Clicking the “Examples” tab on their site and perusing the timelines listed there provides a good overview of what the timelines look like. Timelines can handle a variety of content types:…

February 25, 2013, 8:00 am

Host a Website on Google Drive

By George Williams

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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September 8, 2011, 3:00 pm

Do You Need Your Own Website While On The Job Market?

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Jentery Sayers, who recently completed his PhD at the University of Washington and is now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Victoria. He previously wrote on "Integrating Digital Audio Composition into Humanities Courses." He is @jenterysayers on Twitter.--@jbj]

Over at Crooked Timber back in June 2008, Eszter Hargittai wrote: “I’ve been continually surprised over the years about how many academics fail to take advantage of the Web as a medium for disseminating their work. This seems especially important in the case of those actively seeking a job in the near future.” Hargittai’s post has drawn fifty comments, which exhibit a spectrum of opinions on how academics might develop a professional (or is it personal?) website. Dreamweaver, Blogger, Netscape Composer, Kompozer, copying someone else’s HTML, and—wait for it, wait for…

March 15, 2011, 3:00 pm

Using Lynx to Test Modern Web Sites for Accessibility

By Cory Bohon

If someone were to tell you that you could test a modern, standards-compliant website for accessibility using 20-year old web browser technology, you might think they were crazy. This crazy idea is something that I thought up a few weeks ago when I was sleep deprived, but as it turns out, I might actually be on to something.

See, when you strip away the modern website complexities of things like CSS 3, JavaScript, or Flash, you end up with the same old technology that websites “back in the day” used: HTML. This HyperText Markup Language has been around since the beginnings of the web, and was used to create the first web pages back in 1991. Sure, its gotten more complex over the years, but at its core, it’s still the same.

When the web was first invented, software was needed to navigate through the simplistic HTML page structures of the time. A web browser called Lynx was created…