Periodic Fable

Thursday, 30 January 2003

posted by Helen Whitehead 9:20 PM

Something to show how blogs work....

I was looking for an example of skins and the ability for users to customise a website's look.
One example, apparently in Flash is at Will Young's website

posted by Helen Whitehead 9:13 PM

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Tuesday, 28 January 2003

Study says boys read - they just don't read much. There have been lots of studies in the UK too about this. David Clayton was an advocate for boys' reading. I was recently contacted about a project in the South West to develop boys' literacy through ICT.

posted by Helen Whitehead 3:54 PM

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Philadelphia Inquirer | 01/23/2003 | When files survive, but not the technology to read them

"Joe Miller of the University of Southern California recently learned that he could not access data from the 1976 Viking Mars landings, which were stored on magnetic tape; a [15-year-old] digital version of the approximately 900-year-old Domesday Book [produced with thousands of UK school chidlren] can only be read by specially tailored hardware and software that are aging; and PC users who migrate files from one format to another may experience losses. "

posted by Helen Whitehead 9:59 AM

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Friday, 24 January 2003

BBC NEWS | Technology | The most annoying spam of 2002

posted by Helen Whitehead 12:16 PM

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Thursday, 23 January 2003

ThinkGeek :: Stuff for Smart Masses - Sorted - all this year's birthday presents!

posted by Helen Whitehead 3:53 PM

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More about spam.... Uh-oh: Spam's getting more sophisticated - Computerworld

posted by Helen Whitehead 11:50 AM

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Wednesday, 22 January 2003

Spam

Congress to take on spam, copyright

When the 107th Congress ended its work last November, politicians
discarded dozens of technology-related bills that had been briefly
considered but were never enacted. Now that the 108th Congress has begun this week, some of those controversial proposals dealing with spam, copyright and Internet taxes will resurface--and some stand a better chance of becoming law. January 8, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
Conference article

Email Security
Encryption

You can encrypt your messages - using an application such as PGP (See the Offical PGP site)

Reduce the chances of someone accessing your email:

Never save your password
Web-based email:Copies of your correspondence are likely to be stored in the cache
Always log out of the email site if it's a web-based email service
Clear the cache and close the browser

Anonymous Remailers
allow you to send email without revealling your name or email address

Junk email - usually anonymous & Spam

Ask yourself, how did you get on the spammer's list?
No combination of measures is foolproof

* Never reply to spam

* Use filters

* Notify your ISP or email provider

* Read privacy policy and help documents provided by your ISP and email provider.

* Don't put your email address on your webpage if you can avoid it (use a hotmail or other free account or a mailing form that hides your address)

* Don't put your address into web forms and the like - keep a free ddress specifically for mailing lists

Confidence Tricks

Beware of scams, there are as many on the Internet as in the real world.

Don't reply to anything suspicious
Don't believe sob stories
Don't get involved in chain emails
Petitions: If a petition asks you to put your name on the end and pass it on to 50 of your friends, just think: your name will appear on 50 lists: petitions are only any use if they have unique names/signatures.

Cookie dangers

Cookies can report on your surfing and even your email address:
Bill Thompson clicked on a link in an email and found himself the pornographic email
target of pornographic email

posted by Helen Whitehead 2:00 PM

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Friday, 17 January 2003

Learning CSS

I have decided that it is essential to learn CSS for my next website, and have found a useful online tutorial/guide at w3schools.com

Of course, there's always Webmonkey

and Lissa explains everything at a nicely simple level designed for kids but I suspect the kids don't need it and we slow grown-ups do!

posted by Helen Whitehead 4:10 PM

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Wednesday, 15 January 2003

Crime Online: How web-writers subvert the genre of crime fiction

New media is a completely new form of writing, but it has evolved from other media and genres.

Writers have developed poetry, programming, video and cartoons, to name just a few. Here are some creative web-writing projects that have taken crime writing as inspiration, in various ways.

Online crime magazines, SHOTS

Crime Writers’ Association

TrAce Online Writing School which has an online course in Writing Crime and Mystery Fiction

Writer of Roman historical detective novels... Lindsey Davis

Molly Brown's website, accompanying her period whodunnit “Invitation to a Funeral”

Tangled Web UK

ClueLass

The Heist: A hypertext crime novel, a bit primitive by today's standards, by Walter Sorrel

Clues: Rob Kendall's poem series dressed up as a noir mystery

MOOs are one way to role-play online and there have certainly been crimes in cyberspace, the most well-known being a rape which occurred in LambdaMOO, reported by Julian Dibbell in his noted essay, chapter one of his book My Tiny Life

M is for Nottingham?

More of a game than literature...an online whodunnit

posted by Helen Whitehead 5:01 PM

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Tuesday, 14 January 2003

Flash Poetry

I'm quite fond of Flash poetry.
But sometimes I wonder if the multimedia actually adds anything to the text.

From Thom Swiss' collaborative Flash poetry
I look at Flood, in which the form really suits the content, and Shy Boy, which I think would be just as powerful in simple plain text, because the Flash doesn't add anything - at least not for me....

I like Deena Larsen's Carving in Possibilities in frAme 6 and Firefly in Poems That Go

Another of my favourite Flash poets is Peter Howard.
I love his Poppy
anmd I even took his Animated Poetry in Flash course at the trAce Online Writing School - only to realise that

I am not a poet

Flash isn't easy to use

Flash poetry is an artform I'm not going to master

So it's back to quirky hypertexts for me....

Meanwhile a favourite print poet with a website is Alison Brackenbury
But I suppose I have to declare an interest - I'm her webmistress. But it's one of my pleasantest jobs adding new poems to her site.

posted by Helen Whitehead 2:34 PM

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Thursday, 9 January 2003

Fanfiction

...has a vocabulary all its own

slash = homoerotic relationships between main characters. Derived from the slash between Kirk/Spock which was the first type, before fanfic even moved online

shipper site = relationshipper = site about romances between two previously platonic characters in a series/book

site clique ??? (maybe what used to be called a webring, maybe community)

collective ??? (maybe a site where people write fanfic together, or a collaborative fanfic site, or a collection of pictures from a series... not sure)

lemon = sexual encounter (lime or citrus is a lighter version!) - is a warning to people who might be offended (e.g.,The following is a lemon story....)

Mary Sue = the author puts herself in the fanfic story usually as the main character's love interest: an unrealistically powerful, able or attractive character

And my favourite Fanfic site? Not fanfic as such but a study of it

Site looking at the Xenaverse (a doctoral dissertation even) from Christine Boese

posted by Helen Whitehead 8:10 PM

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Wednesday, 8 January 2003

Creativity

Another area of interest

Creativity and Cognition (the conference last October 13-16 at Loughborough)

http://www.inventionatplay.org/ a "highly interactive, engaging and surprising traveling exhibit that focuses on the similarities between the way children and adults play and the creative processes used by innovators in science and technology."

posted by Helen Whitehead 3:32 PM

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New media adaptations of "old-media" material

Barry Smylie (animation), Susan Katz (poetry), Ryan Douglas (music)
Their Flash translation of (more inspiration from) Homer's Iliad, Book 18 (Achilles' Immortal Shield)
http://barrysmylie.com/iliad/book18/pages/bookeighteen.htm

Also Pepys' Diary by Phil Gyford

Pushkin Translation Designed by Megan Sapnar / Translated by Dmitry Brill
and a Garden of Proserpine Written by A.C. Swinburne (1839-1909)
Designed by Laura McCabe

Roland HT by Vika Zafrin - a critical exposition and literary experiment which has as its focal point the protagonist of the 11th-century Song of Roland and of many other works in European literary canons.

posted by Helen Whitehead 3:02 PM

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