Instructions for the Technically Cautious V

The Amazon Wish List

Have you discovered this yet? It's like shopping without shopping. Once you have an Amazon account, then whenever you are looking at something and think, "Hey, I'd like to remember how much I like this," or "Maybe I'll buy this when I have money someday," you can just click the "Add to Wish List" button on the right side of the page and *poof* it shows up on your Wish List. You can even create different lists for different desires, like one for DVDs and another for books, or one for kids books and another for your romance novels, you saucy thing you.

But it gets better! You can share your list with other people in a most charming way. Go to your Wish List by clicking the Wish List in the "Your Lists" menu on the top right. Once there, you can add, delete, rate, and comment on any of your selections. Also, if you look down the left margin, you'll see a button that says "Tell people about this list." Click it, and it gives you the option of emailing it, adding a button to your web page, or adding a widget to your web page. If you choose the button option, Amazon will generate the necessary html code to place in your web page code to display something like this:

It's as easy as that! Now your friends know what you want for Christmas, and Amazon will be happy to provide the goods.

I'd like to also congratulate my sister Jen on creating a family google group for sharing our Christmas lists. I'm so proud (a note, though: if you want to put this button on a google group page, you need to first click the "Edit HTML" button at the bottom right of the page when working on it. The paste the code from Amazon wherever you want it to appear).

#32

I can't help but do one more post. I suggested we share songs and pictures and all that kind of stuff, so I thought I would take a minute to explain some of the techniques to do just that.

I'm sure you all have figured out how to do pictures since the program does it for you. But what if you want to make a picture that only pops up when you click on a certain word, like this one? It's easy. Once you've uploaded the image and that long strip of code shows up in your post, just delete the middle part—the second long string bracketed between greater-than and less-than signs. Then put the word you want to become a link right in between the remaining brackets, after the long one beginning "<a href" and before the short one that's just "</a>."

Or what if you want to make a word a link to some other website or article or song or something? Here's what you need to know:

To make a link, you have to encompass a word with two tags, one to start the link and one to close it. For the first one you type this:

<a href="http://www.coolwebaddress.com">

and fill the space in the quotation marks with whatever web address you want.
Then you write whatever words you want to be the link, and then you follow it with the closing tag: </a>. It's that easy, but you need to make sure you've made no mistakes or it won't work.

You can also add something to the first tag to make sure that the link opens in a new window when it's clicked. For this, type your link as follows:

<a href="http://www.somewhere.com" target="_blank">

Sharing music is a little more difficult because of copyright laws. Generally, the song needs to be available on the internet to listen to for free. You can't use tracks from CDs you own. But if you want to share a song from, say, Napster, all you need to do is find the link to the song itself (which can be found on the player in the little box that says "Email It." That address is the one you need to put in the tag for the link). Here is a song I would like to share with all of you. It's creepy and awesome.

If you want to know anything else, anything more complicated than that, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

And now, if there's nothing else, here is a list of things I wanted to share with you:

an A paper,
a song I just love,
a newspaper article that surprised me,
a crossword clue that look forward to solving,
a website that pleased me,
a new product everyone should try,
a sweet new recipe,
a compliment I received,
a tradition I am starting,
a crush I am managing,
a habit I am breaking,
a plan I am hatching,
a book I am devouring,

and for good measure, here's another song I totally dig. And one more.

Instructions for the Technically Cautious IV

Have you guys figured out podcasts yet? I just did, and it has changed my life. Turns out you don't even need an iPod to enjoy them. Here's the scoop:

Podcasts are like radio shows you can download and listen to anytime. In fact, many of them actually are the radio shows you know and love, like A Prarie Home Companion or This American Life. And they're free (at least I've never found one that charged). All you have to do is go out and find them and download them onto your computer, just like you would any other file.

The easiest way I've found to find great podcasts is to open up iTunes, go to the iTunes store, choose the podcasts link on the left, and look around. You can look by topic or by browsing the various flashy menus in the store. You can choose to download only certain episodes, or you can subscribe to a cast and then it will automatically download each new episode as it comes out. Once you have them, they are just like music files, so you can listen to them on your computer or stick'em on a player to take with you. I've become a big fan of listening to NPR and stuff on my way to and from school. Here's some of the podcasts I've subscribed to.

• Astronomy Cast: Some guy and some girl talk about cool stuff in space each week. Lately they've been going planet by planet, giving us the lowdown on what we know about each.
  
• Barnes and Noble's Meet the Writers: Each week they interview a popular writer about their work. Recent guests include Dave Barry, Henry Winkler, and Garrison Keillor.
  
• NPR's All Songs Considered: Each week they play a bunch of crazy new music you've never heard of. Some of it is fantastic, and Bob Boilen's commentary is always intelligent and fun. They often broadcast entire concerts form local clubs (wherever local is for them—DC?).
  
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me: Each Saturday contestants phone in to answer trivia questions from that week's headlines. Winners get NPR announcer Carl Castle's voice on their answering machine. This show is f-u-n-n-y, and you can pretend you're learning.
  
• NPR Sunday Puzzle: Will Shortz of the New York Times does word puzzles with a phone-in contestant. Then he gives a take-home question that you can answer to become the next week's contestant.
  
• New BYU Speeches: You can hear each week's devotional or forum on your own time—why is it that when I was actually there I felt too busy to go each week, but now I don't want to miss it? Oh Elisa, come back to portal J.
  
• This American Life: Ira Glass takes us through several stories or reports on a common topic each week as he explores this American Life. Not quite journalism, not quite literature, but often fabulous. A recent episode featured a phone conversation with Phil Collins by a girl looking for advice in writing a break-up song.

Some day I'm gonna publish my own podcast, right here on the blog. Someday.

Instructions for the Technically Cautious III

About a year ago I decided to learn a thing or two about web design. I don't know why—the internet is pretty far afield of my normal interests. I don't find it as disappointing as my brother does (who became permanently disaffected with it when he couldn't find any useful information on the old 'net for "jumping a rail" and running away hobo-style), but I do have my qualms.

And I also have my joys. I see the internet largely as a repository for unproofed text written by those uninterested in the finer points of punctuation. Therefore, those of us (shortly may we live) who take pride in our semicolons and our m-dashes can feel a little more special by using them properly in such an arena. Add to this the fact that most of the internet doesn't seem to allow for things like an e with an accent mark above it or a true m-dash (we usually just double-hyphen everything), and the niche for people like me gets smaller and more pleasantly elite. For there is a way to maintain the standards of proper punctuation even on something as unruly as the internet:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you...the ESCAPE CODE!

An escape code is a way to use a special character in your text without screwing with the program that reads the source. Let me put it this way: a web page is really just a sheet of commands that the computer reads in order to display what you see. Not only does it contain the text you will see, but it has lots of lines of special instructions. Lots of these instructions use the funnier marks we want to use in our writing, so we need another way of telling the computer to insert them into out text. The escape code does just that.

Suppose you want to put an m-dash in you sentence—like this (an m-dash is a really long dash). When you type out your blog entry, you type an ampersand and then "mdash" and then a semicolon. You put it touching the words on either side, just as you would the dash itself. It looks like this:

I was walking down the street and&mdash;BAM&mdash;I got blindsided by an m-dash.

When the computer reads this it displays this:

I was walking down the street and—BAM—I got blindsided by an m-dash.

Because an ampersand (&) is part of the code, you need a code to write one. It's &amp;. Crazy, huh? An é is &eacute;. A £ is &pound;. It's totally sweet. You can find complete lists of all the escape codes by just googling "html escape codes" or something similar. You can show people you care.

[à á â ã ä æ è é ê ë ì í î ï ò ó ô ö õ ù ú û ü and sometimes ý ÿ]

So what I'm really saying here is that not only am I a grammar snob, I'm a total nerd. I just wanted you to know.

Instructions for the Technically Cautious II

I want to tell you about labels. I've only just discovered them, and I can see how they would be useful. The deal is that I can label my entries by topic to enable someone to search through them that way. For example, if I was always getting stood up on dates and coming home to write about it, I could mark all those entries with a label like "disappointments" or "public humiliations" or just a plain "I got stood up," and then if you needed a laugh and only wanted to read those stories out of all the blog entries I'd done, you could click that label from the list on the left of the page and up would pop just those entries no matter when they were written. Great, huh?

Here's how I plan to use it. I'm going to write explanations of the blogs I follow (the ones listed to the left under the title "Blogs I Follow") and mark those posts with a label like "Blogs I Follow." Are you following? Then if you were wondering which of those on that list to the left are worth checking out, you could call up the explanations I've posted by clicking on that label. You'd then be able to see that The Franklin Chronicle is a family news blog by my buddy Joey and Mere Complexities is a personal blog by my friend Amanda.

I'll also create labels for any reviews I write on books I've recently finished or movies I've seen or whatever, plus I'll make one for posts like this, my "instructions for the technically cautious." Don't you find my doing so polite and considerate?

Instructions for the Technically Cautious

For the benefit of those who haven't spent hours piddling around the internet or who lack an innate sense of dot-comity, I thought I'd give a few pointers on how to enjoy a blog.

The trick is to get the feed. Someone invented something called "RSS" and it's great. I'm not sure it works on every computer or with every browser, but if you can do it you'll find keeping up with things much easier. Here's the deal: certain websites, like this one, can automatically let you know when they've been updated. That way you don't have to get on all the time to check, nor do you have to go searching the entire website to find new stuff.

If you're running a Mac with Safari, you know a site has RSS if those letters show up at the end of the address bar when you visit a page. Click on the letters and the page will change to the RSS feed view, a series of headlines of the most recent updates. If you add this page to your favorites, you can always come back and see what's new. If you put the site in your bookmarks bar, a number in parentheses after the link name will tell you if there are any updates, and how many. (You can set these things in the Preferences under the RSS tab—check it out!)

If you are using the new Internet Explorer 7, RSS is built into the browser—it looks like an orange box with three white, curved lines in it. Look for it on the top right of the window, in with the home button and the other helps. If the box is lit up, that means RSS is available for the site. You can goof around with it and see how it works—I'd tell you but I'm not sure myself.

I hope this helps a little. It sure helps me, and it makes it much easier to enjoy the internet without feeling like a total nerd. (Oh, also there's a link near the bottom of this page that asks if you want to subscribe. Click it?)