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The USF Polytechnic will be closed tomorrow Tuesday, August 19th due to tropical storm Fay. Therefore, the Library and Open Use Lab will be closed as well. We will know Tuesday if the campus will open Wednesday.
The bookshelves have been wrapped this afternoon as a preventative measure but the books will remain available if [...]
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After way to many years, we finally have a mechanism that allows Blackboard Instructors to view the course as a true student. Simply called “Create Temporary Student”, this tool creates a student account based on your own NetID and password and enrolls them into your Blackboard course.
Use the new temporary student [...]
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Blackboard is offering Blackboard Sync, a Facebook application that delivers course information and updates from Blackboard to you inside Facebook. You can find out if you have a new assignment, grade, new forum posts, etc., without having to leave Facebook. Blackboard Sync also cross-references your courses’ Rosters with Facebook to make it [...]
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UPDATE: Google has released version 0.10.1, this guide is based on the 0.10.0 code but there should not be any major deviations. As always post on the Google Gadgets for Linux message board if you run into problems.
I was never a fan of desktop gadgets/widgets as most of the ones available performed horribly and had [...]
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Lesson one’s read was great!
From my readings I learned how important that employing excellent web design techniques will result in a successful website. Principles of Beautiful Web Design’s website was extremely informative because it briefly describes the physical characteristics of creating beautiful webpages (layout, color, texture, etc). I also learned of the free [...]
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Last year I was honeymooning in Australia, this year I’m in Wisconsin starting a new job and still unpacking the new house.
I hate missing this, especially since my dissertation focuses on this fabulous group of passionate placebloggers, but I’ve already promised myself I won’t miss Mardi Gras next year and I won’t miss [...]
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I know that there are some of you out there waiting to here how things are going. So, here goes...
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I have wanted to write this post for a while now. So I will take a few minutes....
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Sunday morning , August 17th, starting at 6:00am and ending by 6:30am, Information Technology will be upgrading the software on the two backbone routers in the SVC Data Center. For the Libraries, it means that web and EZProxy access will be affected.
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NetLibrary is the USF Libraries’ largest collection of online books from various publishers. While USF has not purchased the entire NetLibrary collection, the USF collection numbers over 60,000 titles with a focus on scholarly publications with some general interest titles included. Over 54% of the titles are from university presses such as Oxford, [...]
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August 9, 2008, was the culmination of over 4 years of hard work at USF. “I did it!” Now I’m proud to be a USF Alumni! Go Bulls.
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Today I graduated from the Year 4 of the Sunshine State Library Leadership Institute in Tallahassee. Graduation was held at the Florida State Library and Archives.
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Tonight I retold the fable, A Whale of a Tale, in class!
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Processing began for student enrollments for Fall courses in Blackboard. Students registered for Fall courses in OASIS/Banner should now be enrolled in those courses in Blackboard. The Blackboard course sites are available, and students are now able to view and interact with them.
Happy Fall Semester.
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See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die
BTW before the spoof came out I totally called it being one that used images of The Golden Girls!
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The USF Libraries is testing a new catalog — WorldCat Local. This tool delivers search results from both USF Libraries collections and libraries around the world. More information is available by visiting the USF Libraries/WorldCat Local FAQ.
Your feedback is important in the development of this new search tool. Please give us your comments and suggestions [...]
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The USF Poly Library will be open during the following hours starting Saturday, August 9:
Saturdays: 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM
Sundays: closed
Mondays to Fridays: 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Regular opening hours will resume Monday, August 25 at 9:00 AM. To note the Open Use Computer Lab will follow the same hours.
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A conference in Jekyll Island Georgia, family visits in Oklahoma, a ball game and fireworks in St. Louis...
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When summer is long and the water is beautiful, what better way to heal yourself...
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This post is to let people who care about my family know a bit about what is happening to my brother Andrew...
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There is both far too little and far too much going on right now. I just started a new job doing tech support for USF, which is turning out to be an incredibly sweet gig. The pay is horrible, but the fact that I’m doing tech support and helping people (yay) without the soul crushing [...]
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Andy and Daisy SOLD ,
A year ago my Andy and I were on a plane to Australia to elope, today we’re 2 days shy of celebrating our 1st wedding anniversary and the happiness continues! [...]
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Wow!
I won the poster competition for my poster entitled Power Management for BitTorrent.
That was completely unexpected!!!
My buddy Paolo Aguilar from Mexico won second place with his poster Trajectory Control and Reinforcement Learning (robot soccer!)
Clayton Gandy and Nicole Weber tied for 3rd place with their posters.
Congratulations to everyone in the program. All the posters looked [...]
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Here are the books newly arrived at the USF Polytechnic Library during the months of May, June and July. As always, new circulating books are found in the “New books” stacks in the Group Study area; the new reference books are being immediately shelved in the Reference stacks; the new DVDs are available on request [...]
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I’ll try to get Tweets on this blog page.
Twitter Updates
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Many of you have been looking here only to find that I am behind in posting...
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An important part of any paper, presentation, or poster is the associated figures and diagrams.
While there are numerous tools to create graphs and charts from numerical data (and I’ve already professed my current love of scipy) the creation of graphs that aren’t based on data is pretty important too.
PowerPoint is probably the most commonly used [...]
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I created this post over at The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator:
Darling I just had a terrible scare when I thought I have not updated this since people stopped clapping and Tinkerbell died… You would not believe how insane my life has become. Apologies to my regular readers! Even the little blue ones!.
I am overwhelmed with [...]
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When he traveled time
For the future of mankind
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world.” - Black Sabbath
I am the worst person I know. Not that I’m particularly abhorrent or contemptuous, just that my personality (only sometimes) will drop to the pit of my stomach and a chill settles in my brain just [...]
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As much as I enjoy the trendy books out there on the internet and collaborative software, Howard Rheingold is the only author of such texts that I know of who also actively considers social media’s impact upon teaching.
Whether it’s his video letting his students see his point of view when looking out into [...]
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Yesterday I received my first shipment from drugstore.com. While the locals in Wisconsin probably think the weather lately has been hot & humid, it’s been “perfectly perfect in every way” for me. Considering I grew up in NOLA and lived in Tampa for the past 5 years, 86-degree weather is nothing to me! [...]
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The OpenOffice suite has been installed on the Public Access machine. What is OpenOffice? It is a free, open source software suite containing a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, database software, presentation software, a picture editor and a graph editor. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read [...]
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So, I have to calculate some percent differences and get averages etc etc etc…
Lately I’ve been using scipy for most/all of my data analysis, but I decided that I didn’t feel like figuring out how to organize the data in a script and would just do these particular calculations “by hand” with excel.
So, there are [...]
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You now have a new option in the catalog when looking at a particular item. Among the little icons underneath the location (the ones saying “Add”, “Print”, “Email”, etc), you will find a new one showing a cell phone and the wording “Text”. This can be used to text yourself the call number of a [...]
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The USF Libraries catalog now sports the new name of the USFP Library as a location for items.
That means that if you do an advanced search and use the pull down menu for the Location field, you will see “USF LIBRARY - Polytechnic” as an option. As well, when search results are pulled up [...]
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I’m finally back from an exhausting week at Camp Boggy Creek. Walking back from the firework show, I caught a glimpse at the beautiful moonlight on the lake. There is something about being in a place like Boggy that makes you want to love everyone around you. Wouldn’t the world be a [...]
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This has been a great semester of playing with toys… I mean, learning how to create library presentations in a variety of formats. I’m happy with what I’ve learned and what I’ve created, but as with almost every graduate class I’ve taken, I only want to keep learning. My goals for the future include learning [...]
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I chose to set up a USF blog for this project. I used the Unix group’s “Set Up a USF blog” link and the next day they had installed a Wordpress blog in my web server directory. There was only one small snag—I didn’t get the email they said I would get to give me [...]
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For this project, I recorded a short “Summer Poem Podcast.” It was really hot the day I recorded it, so I decided to actually do a poem about a snow man to cool down… but the overall effect was the same!
The first challenge of this project was finding a recording software to use. I [...]
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For this project, I chose to do a trifold brochure to promote the materials in the FAU Digital Library’s digital collections. This project built on a project that I had actually done as part of my work for the DL. I was asked to make a poster that would go in the hallway to promote [...]
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Having just used Powerpoint to present as part of my first on campus job interview (successfully, seeing as I got the job), I felt like this module would be very straightforward for me. Thus, in my plan, I focused on challenging myself to create a clean design and employ “bells & whistles” only when they [...]
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I was excited to tackle this module. I had completed a basic Dreamweaver course through the IT training program at the library where I work, and I wanted to use my skills again before I got rusty. One thing I have noticed about many softwares/technology tools is that they may not be very hard to [...]
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Class Goals:
1) To demonstrate the ability to use a web communication software for educational purposes.
Personal Learning Goals:
1) To hone my sense of how to write online for an education-driven audience.
2) To quickly create a communication venue that looks clean and functions well for the purpose I have chosen.
Process:
1) Choosing a software: my new place of employment uses [...]
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Class Goals:
1) To create a 30 sec. to 1 min. audio file.
Personal Learning Goals:
1) To become confident about the process of audio recording for possible future podcasting projects.
2) To get practice writing a brief script on a library topic.
Process:
1) Choosing a topic: it’s summer, and I love poetry. So, I’m going to do a summer poem podcast.
2) Background research: I [...]
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Class Goals:
1) To create a print publication using MS Word or another publication software.
Personal Learning Goals:
1) To create a publication that is related to an area of library interest for me.
2) To hone my ability to insert, resize, and manage images in a publication.
Process:
1) Choosing a topic: I recently worked on a poster for the Digital Library [...]
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Class Goals:
1) To create a 5-10 minute Powerpoint presentation on a topic of library interest demonstrating basic MS Powerpoint skills.
Personal Learning Goals:
1) To create a presentation that I can use to showcase a personal area of interest.
2) To make conscious decisions regarding which bells & whistles to employ—rather than adding functions for their own sake, to choose which [...]
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In a previous post (”Intersecting Responsibilities“), I included a list of Spanish-language blogs that focus on archives in Latin America and the Caribbean. Here’s another resource to add to the list:
Archivos de Iberoamérica: Directorio de archivos y recursos archivísticos Latinoamérica, España, Portugal: http://www.archivosdeiberoamerica.net/
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The following genealogy records now are available:
Birth, marriage and death records of Lima, Peru (1874 - 1930): http://search.labs.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#p=2;c=1439836;t=browsable;w=
Ciudad Rodrigo (Spain) Parish registers (1550 - 1930): http://search.labs.familysearch.org/recordsearch/start.html#p=2;c=1431464;t=browsable;w=
In addition, GenealogyBank now has more than 230 Spanish language newspapers available for online searching. Visit GenealogyBank or
their Official Blog for more information.
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The long-awaited EBSCOhost 2.0 interface is now fully implemented. This is the first redesign of the EBSCOhost interface since 2002, and its functionality incorporates the latest technological advances.
You can find a wide range of tools and information to streamline your transition to the new design:
An overview of EBSCOhost 2.0 is provided in a Flash [...]
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July 25 - August 4: V Feria Internacional del Libro. Ciudad de Guatemala, Guatemala.
August 22 - 31: “One Caribbean, One Purpose, Our Culture, Our Life.” CARIFESTA X , Guyana.
http://www.guyfolkfest.org/carifestax2008.htm
October 25 - 27: The Sixth International Conference on the Book. Washington, D.C.
http://www.Book-Conference.com
November 7 -8: Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies. [...]
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So, I’ve finally reached the point in my latest research endeavor at which numbers need to be crunched. Because I’m a programmer, and thus inherently lazy, instead of using a program like Excel which requires me to click at least 3 buttons to get anything useful I decided to take a look at SciPy.
While I’ve [...]
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And so, when I left my Apartment in Tampa, I broke the room 304 fellowship. I must admit, we did have a decent year. The guy who lived next to me was evicted and someone else moved in for the summer…forming the sequel to the story. I wonder how the place will [...]
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I was afraid of audacity, but it was very straight-forward and easy to use. I had fun with this one! I played with some music files on freeplaymusic.com. I ended up using a file titled “Beyond the Bookshelves”. I could not resist it from the title alone! I had to [...]
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Karen Geis
Instructional Graphics
LIS5315.721C08
Dr. Simon
I started this course with no experience in developing web sites. I did not have any web design software on my home computer. I initially thought I’d use one of the free Web design sites but changed to Frontpage. I used the computers at the Sarasota USF campus. With a great [...]
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Flashvista has a pleasant blue color around the main site content. It is a combination of search engine and directory for flash sites and resources. Navigation leads to tutorials, news, templates, games, books and the newest cool site.
Flash Tutorials has a great color combination of blue and pink. The site contains many tutorials, resources and [...]
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After being several month’s away from Tampa, I discovered that going to mass at the Catholic Center has not changed a bit. I took my violin and my music to church. Surprisingly, the music was in the same place where I left it two months ago. When I got to church, [...]
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This lesson includes some very great websites. Out of all of these web sites, I actually downloaded the audacity site and created my own mp3. However, I do not know how to add it to this blog as of yet but I will continue to work on it. Audacity is great and I [...]
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I Love Typography Menu on top, rollover changes color. Plain, use of whitespace, black text with some red text here and there
I Love Typography: 15 Examples of Excellent Web Typography Would have been better if they explained what was so great about these examples.
Typographica A graphic with “Typographica” runs along the top of the [...]
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Recent Education News
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I enjoyed looking at the different textures and backgrounds, especially ones that were available for free. In the interest of time, I limited myself to ones that could work with my site’s theme.
Urban Dirty I generally stay away from websites with white font on black background, but here, it works - the font size [...]
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Chapter 2 in Beautiful Web Design was all about Color. It’s interesting now to see the different color combinations, tertiary colors, etc. And to learn which color combinations work well when.
Web Style Guide looks plain, with its black text on white background and blue hyperlinks, but it makes it easier to see. [...]
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I’ve come to realize that the textbooks are easier for me to understand than many of the websites I have to peruse for this class. Could it be that the textbooks assume you don’t know anything and the websites are very technologically-oriented?
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers provides information about domain [...]
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After a long hiatus from playing the violin for The Ties That Bind, we regrouped for a phenomenal mini performance at a coffee house event last night. This is a picture of after the performance. We were all relaxing at Danielle’s apartment.
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Life is sometimes like opened soda cans on your desktop. A very strange feeling of disappointments and disillusions. I haven’t been back to my dorm for many weeks and came back only to find a part of my life i can’t seem to fit back into. Hopefully, I will adjust soon.
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With a gyro dripping from too many condiments in one hand and imported cider-beer already making it’s way down my intestinal tract at 2 a.m… somehow, I always find myself in front of Malindy Elene. No matter where I need to be as I make my way further downtown, I pass by the petite and [...]
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We’re only a little over a month away from the public opening of the new building! New pictures can be found on the Flickr site. Things are looking great and moving at a much faster pace now.
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Numerous changes are occurring around campus- campus units are merging and splitting, key professionals are leaving, and I am in the process of transitioning my LACS responsibilities to a more capable party. Once the transition is complete, I will make an official announcement welcoming the new LACS librarian. But, until that time…
I’m still [...]
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Respondus Inc. has released Respondus 3.5.4e.
The 3.5.4e patch adds support for the importing of MS Word 2007 (.docx) files, support for version 8 of the Blackboard Learning System, enhanced “Save As” functions (including the new StudyMate Class Server XML format), and other enhancements and fixes. An overview of the enhancements is available at http://www.respondus.com/download/respondus35patch.shtml [...]
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This summer is flying by and I can’t believe it! Here’s a quick time line of events:
In late May, we visited our new hometown of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and checked out several houses. Put in an offer, but was rejected.
In early June, I visited friends in Orlando and was extremely disappointed with the Sex [...]
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There are many nuances to successful blogging, one of the most important being frequent posting. I am not good at this. I chose to use USF’s blogging tool for my blog for this class. The link to my blog for Instructional Graphics is afrustratedlibrariansblog.blogger.com. I prefer the blogger account to my [...]
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At this meeting, I finally found a real start for my webpages! Yea! I started both of them while at class, even choosing buttons and placing titles. I did some more work at home to tweak some of my work, but I was still struggling. It looked disorganized, but I could [...]
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I chose Publisher because of its usability. Of all of the Microsoft programs that can be used for publishing, this one has the most options and templates, and it is the easiest to customize (at the click of an icon). As with all Microsoft products, the icons are the ones that the user [...]
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I noticed that since I only had the blog link included in the menu of the main page it looked odd as I jumped from page to page, so I added the blog link to the menu on every page. Maybe it’s a small thing that no one else will notice but it sure stuck [...]
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Dr. Simon’s advanced links was very helpful for my future web design activities. I bookmarked quite a few as I will need to spend some time exploring the sites in detail and trying the programs.
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I sent the link for my web project to a few of my library colleages to see if they find any issues. Already I have infor on spelling errors. Next time I’ll find an editor with spell checking. It is great when you have friends with backgrounds different than your own as they will look [...]
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We all have to start somewhere, so I guess this is where I begin.
I have a problem with being found on the internet, being known and having my name linked with my active life. It’s odd to think how people can read you, read about you, and read what you write all at the same [...]
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Libraryspot.com Image Resources has a very dramatic bright yellow left-sided navigation bar. There are many links to various types of photographs. Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo, newspapers, Eastman Kodak, Smithsonian, National Geographic and American Memory(Library of Congress) are all listed and show new and historic photographs. The historic photographs on National Geographic, Smithsonian, Eastman Kodak and [...]
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Chapter 15 in Creating Web sites discusses fancy buttons and menus. Specialized buttons and collapsible menus can help make any site stand out. Graphical buttons or image buttons can be used to link to additional pages and information. Dymanic or roll-over buttons change color when the mouse moves over it. Menus are a desired feature [...]
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Websites: These websites all deal with using images. Most of these websites allow you to download free images.
Wiki Public Domain Image Resources - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources
LibrarySpot.com Image Resources - http://www.libraryspot.com/images.htm
Deep Web Resources:
Read Write Web - http://www.readwriteweb.com/
Footnote.com (Historical Image Resources) - http://www.footnote.com/
Tools:
The following websites gives an overview of the different available tool sthat can be [...]
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Originally I wanted to use rollover buttons in my menu but did not know how. Creating the buttons was easy as I have done that before several times for other projects. I have found that printing the screen once you get the button right is a good way to have all the size/color/font info hany [...]
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I’m writing this during a break at the blended session. I’ve seen lots of great design examples so far. It is amazing how creative we all are if we just would give it a try.
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So I got a massage last night by my friend Kari. It was my first ‘non painful’ massage and I enjoyed it. It took me a while to relax but I got comfortable after a while. I did think it was weird that Florida Law requires massage patients to be wrapped up in a sheet. [...]
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I love typography site has a simple design with a white background and black lettering. It is easy to navigate and has an extensive list of articles about typography.
Typographica is another site with a simple design. The site displays many different fonts that are very unique.
Microsoft Typography is an excellent source of information with the [...]
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Pricinples of Beautiful Web Design chapter 5 is about imagery. Photographs and illustration act to draw in the user and help them move around the site. It makes the site look more appealing. Photographs can be taken by the site’s creator, obtained from stock photographic sites or purchased from a professional photographer. Photoshop can be [...]
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Well it’s the half way mark and I really miss Cale. He has called me at least once everyday, which makes my day here a little better, but it still sucks. I can’t wait to see him. Nine more days!
So this whole week I have been working at school for the last rental of the [...]
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Posted: June 28th, 2008, 11:26pm EDT by Daniel
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Websites:
All of the following websites gives useful information about typography. Also, I think that a developer can get some great ideas from visiting each of these sites.
I Love Typography (resource site) http://ilovetypography.com/
I Love Typography: 15 Examples of Excellent Web Typography http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography/
Typographica (Typography Journal and News) http://typographica.org/
Microsoft Typography (resource site) http://www.microsoft.com/typography/default.mspx
ABC Typography (virtual museum) http://abc.planet-typography.com/
A [...]
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Between approximately 7am and 9am, Friday June 27, Blackboard errors were seen when any of the following actions were performed:
Post a message to a discussion board
Take a test
Upload an assignment
On Friday, June 27 During the scheduled maintenance window, a fix was applied to correct a minor performance problem. During the application of this fix, [...]
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Firefox 3 was released Tuesday June 17th. For the most part, Firefox 3 is compatible with myUSF Blackboard, but we have identified at least one significant area in which Firefox 3 fails.
When trying to upload an attachment to an assignment with Firefox 3, we get an error. [...]
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I spend three hours trying to add a RSS news feed to my home page. I tried lots of types but few worked well enough even to consider. I don’t know if I’ll mess with this further but I do want something dynamic on the main page.
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The text chapters on Google Adsense and Amazon Associates was a big help to me. I have used eBay/Paypal before and it was not difficult. Both Google and Amazon are good ways to help fund a site and if the content is valuable it will drive more folks to your site.
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Okay…
This was mentioned at orientation so I’m trying it out.
Hi. I’m Kat and I’m starting USF this summer.
I’m really nervous and I suck at making friends <3
So please be nice to me ….
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I work for Student Government now as the Assistant Comptroller of Travel. It’s a good job and I enjoy it, although it’s a bit complex. More details to come.
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Ones I liked;
15 Examples of Excellent Web Typography - This was good in that there was something specific and limited in scope.
Microsoft Typography - Nice clean site. Even though it MS, you ot to keep on top of what they are up to. the Web imbedded fontstool looked interesting.
ABC Typography - Who would not like [...]
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Turns out I think my flash drive is going buggy. I can get to Dr. Simon’s page without the error if the flash drive is not installed. Time to get another one.
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This project was fairly straight forward. I learned a few new things: like how to imbed a hyperlink in text and how to add sound to my slides. I also learned how to create a more custom background for my slides. This helped me make each slide an individual that will stand [...]
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Urban Dirty had a black background with white lettering. This is very dramatic! It had a simple navigation bar that enables the user to view free textured photos of surfaces. An extensive collections of photos. This site linked to Grunge Texture. This site has a great color scheme. It fits well with the site. It [...]
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Chapter 4 in Principles of Beautiful Web Design discusses typography or communication. The site communicates with its users through the use of type or lettering. This means fonts. Much like color, fonts can convey different moods and meanings. Certain fonts go with certain sites. Some fonts are formal and some are not. Some fonts are [...]
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This video of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor speaking is absolutely amazing. [BTW all of the TED talks are great]
I appreciate her honest emotion so much, particularly b/c it helps me understand my best friend Sarah’s recent stroke [chronicled here on NOLA.com] and once again feel completely optimistic that she will recover 100%!