Monte B. Thompson .com: February 2008

Monday, February 25, 2008

Turn virtually any image into vector art...free

Web site VectorMagic turns virtually any image into vector art that can be resized as much as you want without any nasty pixelation—perfect for creating your scanned signature, for example. The site is free and simple to use, but for a bit more detail check out their how to introductory video. Whether you are trying to perfect your scanned signature or you've got a logo or design you want to be able to resize indefinitely, VectorMagic will do the trick. VectorMagic can be used on photographs to in

Saturday, February 23, 2008

Strive to Engage not Enthrall

Education Today and Tomorrow

Teacher Tube and Student's blogging

I just found out about Teacher Tube, and thought it may be useful to you.
The presentation below demonstrates some benefits and reasons why we should let our students blog. It was uploaded by the author of the edublog at: http://rachelboyd.blogspot.com, where you can find info and links to the class blogs. Hope you find it useful. Music is "English Channel" from freeplaymusic.com

Monday, February 18, 2008

All About RSS Feed

(Source:http://www.techlearning.com/rss/index.php)

Copy and paste this RSS feed URL into your news aggregator as a new channel or feed:

http://www.techlearning.com/rss/all.php

Help With RSS

- Help With Adding An RSS Feed
- Where To Get A News Aggregator (or RSS Reader)
- What Exactly Is RSS?

Help With Adding An RSS Feed
RSS is an Internet format that gives you a new way to quickly and easily access Web-based headlines, blurbs, and article links from a wide variety of sources. It's most often used for showing the latest headlines from online newspapers, magazines, weblogs, and vendor and technology information sites.

Using Automatic Discovery
To access an RSS feed, you need a software program known as a news aggregator or RSS reader. If you already have a news aggregator and it supports auto-discovery, you can usually add an RSS link for a given site by using your aggregator to surf the home page of that Web site.

Adding An RSS Link Manually
When auto-discovery doesn't work, the manual process is easy enough:

1. Copy the RSS feed link from the content site. For many people, this is the most confusing step. If you see an XML icon like this , and you're using Internet Explorer in Windows, you can right-click this button and choose Copy Shortcut to copy the RSS link. Another option is to left click the link and copy the URL from your browser's Address bar. You'll often see unintellgible code in your browser window when you just click an RSS link. This is the XML stream, which is not intended to be interpreted by most browsers. (New plug-ins available for some Web browsers will make this possible, however.)

2. Open your news aggregation tool, initiate a new channel, and paste the RSS link into the URL field. After a few seconds, the feed will populate in your RSS reader. The process of initiating a new channel goes by different names in different news aggregators. It might also be called "adding a new feed." If necessary, consult your news aggregator's Help or documentation for more information.

Where To Get A News Aggregator (or RSS Reader)
News aggregators are available in several varieties. They can be Web-based services, standalone client software, or plug-ins for existing Web browsers or email packages.

Here's a short list of RSS readers you might like to try:

FeedDemon full-featured Windows news aggregator
Bloglines free Web-based aggregator
SharpReader simple, well designed, reads RSS and Atom
NewsGator plug-in for Outlook 2000 and newer
NetNewsWire well-thought-of Mac RSS reader.
NewsMonster Mozilla browser plug-in supports Linux, Windows
Google Search: News Aggregators.

What Exactly Is RSS?
Most sources define RSS as an acronym standing for Really Simple Syndication; other sources say the acronym derives from Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. In fact, all may be correct.

Whatever the letters stand for, RSS is a light-weight XML format for distributing headlines, links, and brief descriptions of Web-based content. Web content providers develop and serve RSS "feeds," or streams of headline content designed to be accessed by news aggregator or RSS reader client software. An RSS reader lets you peruse headlines, read summaries, and the click links to specific stories to open them right on their original Web sites in your default Web browser.

Introduction to RSS - WebReference.com
What is RSS? - XML.com
All About RSS - Fagan Finder
RSS & Atom Tips - Lockergnome
What Is Atom? - Google's Blogger Help
RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters - mnot
RSS 2.0 Specification - Technology at Harvard Law

Sunday, February 17, 2008

How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer

The following is taken from Demystifying College Succes ...

How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer:

Pencil

"The Pain of Writing

Students hate paper writing. It’s not the writing itself that’s horrible, but instead, being forced to write when you don’t want to. Is there any worse feeling than staring at a half-completed term paper at 2 AM?

The solution is simple. Schedule your writing better. But the specifics can be tricky. What’s the best way to schedule writing? Clear out a full day? Do it a little bit at a time? Work at night once you’ve finished all of your other work? I could give you some answers that sound right, but (for now) forget about me. Let’s see what the pros have to say…

read: Demystifying College Succes ...

Publishing from inside Google's Picasa Graphics Editor.

I published this picture from my computer, using Google's Picasa.

And edited this page during Picasa's upload picture to blog mode.

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Making Photographs
a textbook by Philip Greenspun;

Links to the online chapters:

Creative Commons Featured Image Sites

OpenPhoto
Hundreds of stock photos licensed for free commercial and non-commercial use

Flickr's Creative Commons pool
Searchable and browseable database of licensed photos from this photo sharing service

why good journalism is a social and political must

An Associated Press story about a leaked internal study that accuses the Marine Corps of delays in providing mine-resistant vehicles to its forces in Iraq provides ample reason why good journalism is a social and political must, government whistleblowers ought to be fully protected from retribution, and journalists should not be compelled to identify anonymous sources.

First, the news:

Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

Full Story »
add this to links:http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/

Friday, February 15, 2008

Testing Google Docs to blog technology

Well, as we can see, you can publish your work at Google Docs, directly to the blog, this is very covenant, the same option is available in Word 2007.

--------------original Google Doc below--------------------

Testing Google Docs to blog technology

This is just a quickee to see if I can in deed, write text here, and post it automatically to my blog at blogger.

Introduction

The purpose for this blog is to replace the Wordpress blog I had installed on my server, no sooner did I get the former blog up and running, then I start getting notices from Wordpress that the version I had was outdated, and would I please upgrade to the newer release.

I installed the old blog, simply to learn how to install a blogging application onto the server. The host for montebthompson.com is Go Daddy, and they have installation scripts for Wordpress and many other web 2 applications. They also have an auto-uninstall for those applications.

I will be blogging about Web 2 technology, and learning online opportunities, and of course about my site.

Happy surfing!

Monte

Monte B. Thompson .com