FCCJ Weblog & Podcasting Server

Welcome to our new weblog and podcasting server!

This resource is an excellent way for you to create subscription-based content for your classes! Use it for announcements, journaling, special projects, class discussions, lecture archives, research databases and other ideas.

If you need any help in accessing your account, please contact Mitch Chin for more assistance (ext. 2914 or mchin@fccj.edu).

Special thanks to Ian Vanhoof, Director of Emergent Technologies, for getting this blog server up and running!

To login to the server and begin your weblog, please use the following link:

Main Weblog Login

To see a list of all the published blogs, please use the following link:

Published Weblogs

You'll need to log in and choose a name for your weblog. Consider writing a description as well, so that readers will have a sense of the purpose of your weblog.

It is probably best to leave the site path and directory structure alone, unless you're sure of what you're doing.

After you create each new posting, you'll need to change the STATUS of the entry from "unpublished" to "published" in the pull-down menu.

You can also schedule the item to be published later.

It's said that a picture is worth a thousand words, well today I hope to enlighten you on uploading images with some guidelines for them, thus saving your fingers from having to type those thousand words.

Before you start your blog entry, we first need to select an image to up load, you'll want to crop and resize your images. Adobe Photoshop is an excellent tool, iPhoto on the Mac works great, as well as GIMP on the PC. There are also a variety of web sites that will do the same, but for today we will keep it simple.

500 is our magic number, that is the ideal image width within your blog. They can be larger, and you can change the viewing size by editing the html, but in keeping it simple, it is suggested that you proportionally resize your images so that they have an image width of 500 pixels. This will also lessen the time it takes viewers to see you page as well as help to manage the storage space on the server. Once you have edited your image, save it to your hard drive, watch where you put it as you'll need to find it later.

While there are probably many ways to add images to a blog, the easiest way to add an image is to start your blog with one. First click on the "UPLOAD FILE" button in the left nav pane, this will pop up a window that will first ask you to locate an image to upload. After you have browsed and selected your image, click on the upload button. After the image is loaded onto the server, you have the option to view the html or go with the default selection, which is to create a new entry using this uploaded file. You'll also be asked if you like to embed the image in your blog or make it so that it pops up in another window. Lets keep it simple here, go with embedding the image, this means your blog entry will start off with and image, after which you begin to add your text. Clicking on either button, the app will start you off with a new blog entry page, magically adding the necessary code. Here is what it will first look like
"img alt="100_3795.JPG" src="http://media.fccj.edu/blog/100_3795.JPG" width="1632" height="1232" /"

Without getting too in depth with the html, you'll want to change at least two things. First change the alt tag "alt="100_3795.JPG"", to something relevant, like this alt="HugeCobia". Next you need to watch your image size, I added a large image so that you'll see how to change it. Here is the section of the html that you'll need to change. width="1632" height="1232". It's the numbers that have to change, the width should be "500" and the height should be "377". Here is what my html should look like when I am done. "img alt="HugeCobia" src="http://media.fccj.edu/blog/100_3795.JPG" width="500" height="377" /"

So you see your blog entries don't have to be all text, it's nice to visually spice it up with some pictures.

If you have any questions or comments, constructive please do not hesitate to add them.
Thanks
Mitch

Ok, so maybe you have an account with one of the many image hosting sites like
"photobucket"

or
"flickr"

and you'd like to add some of those images in your blog. Well without having to re-upload them to the FCCJ blog server, you can easily link to them. Now there are many ways to do this and some better then others, the easiest is to cut and paste the location of the individual image. from your hosting site, into your blog. The location address will typically start with "http://", and will sometimes contain the file name with in it. The location can be found by right clicking on the image and either viewing the element properties, or by selecting "copy image location" from the right click menu. You'll have to insert a bit of html, not much, it's easy.
""img alt="the image name" src="paste the image link here" width="450" height="294" /""
what's missing from this code is the "<" before img and the ">" at the end. You may also have to change the image height and width, which is measured in pixels.

Here's a link to a site that is great for brushing up on everyday html.
http://www.w3schools.com/html/

Anyway here's an image linked from my flickr account.
I was able to right click on the image to view the element properties, and then cut and pasted the location in to my blog. Sometimes you find that the image hosting site add some extra html at the end of the location, and some blog servers are not able to deal with it. MovableType didn't have a problem with the "?v=0" added to the end of the location, but I can on other systems. Sometimes you'll have to play around with the link or the image size, but usually the answer is never far off.

Adding video/audio to your blog is similar in concept to adding pictures, the file(s) need to be uploaded or hosted on a server, and then needs to be linked to your blog entry. There are some basic tools for this process, but to really shine, you'll want to brush up on your html.

Here I have uploaded an audio file to the blog server, it's a WAV file. Here is what it will look like to the viewer.

Wave Sample

What's happening is, the file is downloaded to a new page, the problem I have with it is that you loose your current page. Opening it to a new page would be a better user experience in my opinion.

Sample Wav in a new window

This also happens when you upload videos, which by the way have a 100 meg size restriction. Meaning, if your file(s) is larger then 100 megs, it won't upload to the system. The solution is simple, edit the clip into small chunks.

Here is a sample video that I have uploaded to the server. Clicking on the link will open this clip in a new window.

Gheenoe on Guana 320x240

Another way to go is to "embed the link in the page, the problem with this is that it starts to play when the blog page is opened, which could cause performance problems for anyone on a slow connection. You can stop and start the clip by tapping on your space bar. To address this I have stated that "autostart="false"", which means a user will have to click on video image or press the space bar to see the clip play. I have also added a width and height param's to give you control over how large you'd like to see your video. You can how large the clip appears in your blog by changing the numbers. One word of caution is that you will want to keep your numbers relative to each other, otherwise your video will look distorted.

The code I used is...


When I first made this post the clip came out too small so i have since increased the proportions to "WIDTH=460 HEIGHT=380". Also, just so ya know, this clip was uploaded and is coming from the fccj blog server.

Ok, here's a sample of a youtube video embed. The controls come up, but it has the "youtube" logo watermarked on the image. If you click on the video image it will open up a youtube page with this video, if you click on the play button at the bottom, it plays the video in the page.

Here is the same video uploaded to Google Videos
Here's the link as it comes from Google.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4447009190401544018

Gheenoe on Guana from Google

It plays, but there a few problems...

I'll continue to work this further to come up with an elegant solution for audio and videos.

-mc

If you'd like to change the way your blog looks and feels, you can easily change template with the "Style Catcher". It's really pretty easy, just watch the video and go have fun.

changing the theme of your blog

Sometime is takes a few seconds for the styles to show up, if they don't appear, try pressing the "Find Styles" button again. If the thumbnails still fail to show up, please contact me so we can work on getting you the blog of your dreams.

If you have any problems, please feel free to contact
Mitchell Chin @ 997-2914

They're nothing new, you'll see them all over social networking sites like myspace and facebook, as well as blogs. They're really nothing more then an animated gif file, but used right, it could pretty cool. If nothing else, fun.

Here's my Meez, created at
"photobucket"

We are now able to easily subscribe to blogs via itunes, in the podcast format. Wow, that's a mouthful, what I am trying to say is, your audience can now get your latest blog posts, provided they are acceptable to itunes (mov, mv4, mp4, mp3, etc) format. The only thing they have to do is, view your blog, click on the "Subscribe to this blog" link, cut and paste the url into itunes. Now where in itunes do I paste this url?, well if you click on the "Advance" menu item, and drag down and release on the "Subscribe to Podcast" item, a dialog box will pop-up and you'll have a place to paste the url. Once itunes is finished processing the blog, it will display all of the available content. From there, your audience can view what you've posted and even sync it to their ipod or itouch.

Adding Content...

The best way to add pod-castable media to your blog is to upload your mov, mp4, mp3 or mv4 to your blog, and either start your blog entry with that file or get the html, and paste that into your blog.

The copy will look like this, except your blog and file name will be in place of the test one I had used. This by the way is the upload media window, it pops up when you you click on the "upload file" menu item in the left nav region of your blog.

Setting up your browsers...

The 3 browser we have used focused on are Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

First, make sure you have the latest versions of whatever browser you plan on using, also make sure you have the latest version of itunes loaded as well.

Safari -
Drag down from the main menu and select "Preferences" or hit the command and coma key at the same time.

Go to the "RSS" tab, and make "itunes" your default RSS reader.

FireFox -
Drag down from the main menu and select "Preferences" or hit the command and coma key at the same time.


Go to the "Feeds: tab and click on "Choose Application", find and select "itunes" as your default RSS Reader.

This works the same on the Mac as it does on the PC.

Microsoft Internet Explorer -
Ok this one is a little different as version 6.0 doesn't support RSS feeds, so what you have to do is click on the "Subscribe to this blogs Feed" link, a page will come up, disregard all the code in the page, and just cut and paste the url in to itunes. We are now able to easily subscribe to blogs via itunes, in the podcast format.

By the way "linked" media such as videos from "youtube" do not sync over, or at least not in my test situations. So for now, if you want your viewers to see your videos and hear your audio podcasts, the files have to be uploaded to the blog server, via the "upload file" button.

and yes that's it, it's that easy.

-mc