posted
My web page is progressing pretty good--I doubt I will finish it, I am waiting for the school to get me Photoshop and a bunch of school pictures--and now I want to help a teacher set up a "blog" she can incorporate in next years curriculum.
Basically she wants to have a message board where students can either post papers for student critique or have topic related discussions. She wants to encourage reading and research using the web. She wants students to share web addresses and ideas. She wants to be able to post questions and possibly research topics on the web.
I have spent all morning playing around http://www.blogger.com/start and would like to know if anyone knows any other good blog sites?
The Holy Grail would be finding out how to get her set up with an interface similar to our Hatrack forum.
Posts: 1034 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
They were just having a discussion on Sakeriver about various types of forum software (towards the bottom of that discussion). Saxon 75, Mackillian, and the Tick all have forums of their own, so they would be good ones to ask.
If you're going for a straight blog rather than a forum, I'm a fan of LiveJournal.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
What are the differences between a blog and a forum? what are the advantages of either one? [EDIT] Pricing is an issure, so hopefully I can find a free one!
posted
Blogger is supposed to have multi-user ability, but I've never tried it out. Blogger can save to a blogspot site or your own server, but I lost months of archives after I switched to my own server from blogspot. I don't know what happened with that, and it's part of the reason I'm going back to my old blogging format of one week per page all done in html. It's simple and works, just more time-consuming.
A forum might work, and there are various free ones like Proboards. There is one here that is free and gets uploaded to your ISP server. It only works on certain servers: MySQL 3.2x,PostgreSQL 7.x, Microsoft SQL Server 7/2000 and Microsoft Access (via ODBC), which is why I can't use it (my ISP uses a different server).
A problem I came across recently with Proboards is that they will delete your board without warning for a TOS violation - and it's entirely up to them to determine that. A group of friends (of which I am one) lost their forum without warning and the only explanation was TOS violation - not even specifically what was the violation or who reported it.
Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
Both blogs and forums are basically ways to quickly and easily (through a form rather than html code) get time-stamped text up on the web.
A blog is generally intended for use by one or two publishers to put up news about themselves or some specific topic, sort of like a news site, with long posts about something.
A forum is like Hatrack, where an almost infinite number of people can post on the site, organized into "threads" rather than having all posts on one page.
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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posted
Are proboards forums? Or is proboard a "Specific" forum? What is a TOS violation? It is sounding like a Forum may be the best route to go....unless every student made their own blog and the teacher had a blog with links to all the students.
Does anyone have experience with this or strong opinions?
Are there any preferential free blogs or forums?
I really appreciate the source of talent we can tap into here on Hatrack. I appreciate greatly everyone what participates. [EDIT]: My ideal would be a forum like Hatrack where there would be 5 posts controlled by the teacher/moderator, and any additional threads students posted would start below the top 5 threads. This would ensure the teacher could always control the most important discussion for the class without worry that some student will keep posting new threads to bump off the teacher's threads.
posted
There are a number of free forum packages that are pretty good. Tick and I use phpBB, and I have had no problems with it. Leto uses the free license for Invision Power Board, which he says is easier to use, although since I've never used it I couldn't say. Both require your server to support PHP. Either can use a variety of database servers (phpBB uses MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL, or Microsoft Access; Invision uses MySQL, Microsoft SQL, or Oracle).
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Proboards is a specific forum. The people on the forum that was deleted have discussed possibilities and figured out it could have been a topic we had discussing sex.
This is a group of about 70 women. It is a closed forum. Any new people that come in are invited, and the forum is closed to outsiders. It was discovered that at least one of our group (possibly others) had a keylogger program installed on her computer and we believe we know who did that. We believe that is the person who reported the TOS while logged onto our closed forum as this person from our group.
The TOS says:
quote:Your web site must conform to the following standards to be eligible to utilize this service:
User's content must comply in a manner consistent with any and all applicable laws of the State of California and the US Federal Government. User's web site may not contain content promoting the use of illegal drugs, alcohol, sex, pornography, nudity, or any other form of adult content, profanity, hate, "spam," fraud, racism, mlm, pyramid schemes, or promote any illegal activity. User's message board and Web site must be in English.
Before our forum was deleted, we didn't have many problems with proboards. There were times when the server was too busy to view the boards. There was a time when there were some problems getting into the boards and messages seemed to be disappearing.
We have a new setup now, on a server owned by someone in the group.
So, I have mixed feelings about proboards. It is free, but I'm sure there are other free forums out there.
Posts: 2034 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
When you work with a blog, do you need a dedicated hard-drive to store the information? DO they (the blog companies) store it for you? Or is the space you post the blogs on something you have to purchase separately?
[EDIT]
quote: There is one here that is free and gets uploaded to your ISP server.
Does that mean each ISP provider gives you a certain amount of storage space you can utilize? Or do you buy web storage space? Or do Forums hold the storage space? Is it possible to use a seperate hard-drive on an individual computer for storage space? Maybe not...
posted
Forums and blogs are just specific kinds of (active) web pages. Content is stored on the web server, or perhaps a separate backing DB store if they're big & fancy.
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Alexa, I don't mean to be rude, and maybe this has already been brought up in another thread, but if you know so little about how the Internet works, why are you in charge of what sounds like an institutional web site?
In answer to your questions, here's how things work (if any of this is too basic, I apologize):
The Internet is made up of a bunch of interconnected computers. These are called "servers." One aspect of the Internet is the World Wide Web. When you open a web page, your computer (the "client") sends a request to a server and the server sends the web page to your computer, which then displays it. Web pages use a language called HTML to mark up text so as to indicate how it should be displayed. So when the server sends a web page to the client, it is really sending a bunch of text that is specially marked so that it looks pretty.
Some web pages are "static." They are written once and each time they are viewed they look the same. Other web pages are "dynamic." These are generated by a program on the server each time they are requested by a client. Forums are one kind of dynamic web page. Forum software on the server takes requests from each client and then creates a web page on the fly and sends them to the clients.
There are several options for hosting a web site. One way is to have your own server with its own connection to the Internet. In this case, all of your web pages are stored on that computer's hard drive. Another option is to pay for a hosting service. This usually means that you pay somebody else to let you use or share one of their computers. In that case, the web site is stored on the hosting service's computer. A third option is to buy web space from an internet service provider (ISP) such as Verizon or whatever. This is like the second option, except that you usually get less control over the server.
With forums, there is basically two ways to do it. You can either host your own forum (which means that the forum software gets put onto the server you are using, whether it be your own server or one that belongs to a hosting service or ISP that you use) or you can pay someone else to host a forum for you (which means that the forum software is on somebody else's server and you just put a link on your web site to the forum that someone else has set up for you). There are many tradeoffs between the two approaches. Hosting your own forum means more work, but it means greater flexibility and can be cheaper. Having someone else host your forum while you just link to it means that you have almost no work to do, but you also have very little control and the service often costs money.
As for storage space, it depends on whether you have your own server or not. If you have your own server, you can attach as many hard drives to it as you like; it's your computer. If you are using a hosting service or ISP, then you can't. The service will provide you with space to put your web page in (typically ISPs give you around 10 MB while hosting services give you 50 to 500 MB).
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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quote: Alexa, I don't mean to be rude, and maybe this has already been brought up in another thread, but if you know so little about how the Internet works, why are you in charge of what sounds like an institutional web site?
Because I am willing to learn. I already know 30x more about web development now then I did a month ago. I have read an html book, practiced, read the Go-Live book, researched the web, and am coming along nicely with a rather good looking webpage.
I don't take offense. I really don't know a lot--yet. But I am in a job that is designed to just check teachers in and out of a comp lab; since they have no budget for a trained computer technician, I am taking my 7 hours of free time at work a day as an opportunity to learn (and of course post on Hatrack). Why waste my time doing nothing? Why just sit there and help students log in?
I only took the job to get my foot in the district door. I really have quite a menial job.
When I started, they had a new computer lab that was open to students with no supervision for 3 weeks. Computers were crashing, only 20 computers our of the 36 in my lab were working, the school network was frozen, no-one knew how to fix anything, and our district computer technician was impossible to contact--he was overwhelmed. Now the school runs smooth; I got the network running with students having individual folders; I set it up so I could monitor students and kick them off the internet; and I have helped multiple teachers with multiple things. I have learned a lot, and in so doing, I have the school thinking I am as trained as our district person lol.
Now I am thinking of what I want to know and implement in my teaching strategies, and so I am offering to learn/solve anything computer related that any teachers wants to know but don't have time to research. In helping them, I am training myself.
I am not offended and I don’t think you are rude. You have provided a lot of information I never know. The first two paragraphs were very basic, but how/where blogs store information was very helpful. Thank you. Posts: 1034 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Tomarrow I will figure out if our school has storage space or if I need to experiment with a blog/forum site that has it's own storage space. Since I have no budget and I am just researching this for one teacher, I think my options won't be very flexible.
Posts: 1034 | Registered: Mar 2004
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