CSS Tutorial

For editing sites, this CSS tutorial is an excellent introduction.

Also see the J-learning pages on CSS and HTML and photos and graphics.

application.doc

Update for 22 February

This entry was updated 22 February, 4pm.

Note: If you have a pair of headphones or earphones that can plug into a computer, please bring them to our Thursday meeting. You will want them for dealing with audio. (A microphone might be handy, too.)

At this point there are three working groups, each of which has chosen a CMS platform and should by now have access to that platform. The groups so far are:

• Zarifa, Shodiyor, Kamila, and Saleh using Drupal for their CA Journalists project;
• Aiman and Assel using WordPress for their Grad Student site project;
• Noor, Denis, Sasha, Alina, Mina, and Madina I using WordPress for their undergrad community site project

I believe Madina A. is interested in doing a site on women’s issues, perhaps using WordPress.

From here on out your focus should be on developing your project. Planning and revising planning is an ongoing process. Be sure you make a plan that includes specific details on who does what and when, and post the plan as a static page and let me know where you have placed it. Each individual participant should keep track of everything he/she does for the project, both for purposes of work process and for documenting what you have done.

On Thursday I will introduce some audio tools, basic CSS and check in with groups.

Because we will have three weeks without class, all members of each group must meet with me at least once sometime between 8 March and 24 March. (That’s one meeting for each group, with all members present.) Please check your schedules and work out a mutually manageable time with me. If you want to meet in a computer lab, we should try to determine a time right away in order to reserve lab time if possible.

We will work on audio with Audacity, an open source audio program I have had installed in the lab. Audacity user manuals, FAQ and tutorials are all linked through this site. We will do Dan Eliot’s tutorial in class, and perhaps others depending upon how things go.

Audacity is a useful tool for working with any audio, but for our purposes podcasting is the probably the most relevant. For journalists, the internet can be used as a delivery platform for audio reports (an alternative to radio) or for supplementing text and photos with interviews, audio capture, and so on. Posting (or netcasting) audio files in blog entries on a site publishing an RSS feed (remember Bloglines?) creates a podcast the audience can use for easy access to files that can be downloaded to a computer or an iPod (hence the name podcasting) for later listening. (Some also offer streaming audio.)

A few resources relevant to our groups:

• WordPress has a podcasting plug-in and other audio plug-ins also;
• Drupal’s media modules category lists a few audio tools, and a search of the Drupal site reveals a variety of information about podcasting with Drupal;
• Wikipedia’s podcast entry gives a good overview and useful links, including some to podcast search engines.
• The J-Learning site has a few articles about online audio;
• And again, Global Radio News is one example of using sound files in online journalism;
• And Mindy McAdams recently published a tutorial on setting up an audio player that will allow users to listen to audio simply by clicking a link in the entry.

Of course there are limitations to audio online, and here at KIMEP we feel those limits directly. Audio files can be very large (though not always). Here our computer system generally prevents users from uploading or downloading audio files. But there are still ways for us to access audio and you should still consider whether using audio is something you would like to try on your site.

Meeting for 15 February

On the agenda today:

• Project plans (content, site identity, platform, etc)
• HTML, CSS
• Online Tutorials Testing (NewsU, TOL)
• Checking audio software set-up, preparation for next week (equipment check)

Testing Site Feed

Test message for site feed.

Please Enroll with NewsU

The Poynter Institute is one of the prominent journalism training organizations in the United States. They have a project called NewsU that offers online training (much of it free) on many areas of the field. I will briefly introduce NewsU in class today. Please complete the free registration process by following this link: Poynter Institute’s NewsU

-Frederick Emrich

Reminder for 15 February

Please remember for next week:

• Proposal revisions are due;
• Read the J-Learning material on HTML, CSS and Forms linked at this J-Learning page. If you can, try to do these HTML tutorials;
• Please try to have a good idea about what CMS you want to use and what platform (i.e. do you want me to set up hosting for you, or do you want to make some other arrangement). The sooner you do this the better. I probably need about two days notice to set up working space for project groups on my server. If you talk to be about this before the next class, then you might have your prototype site ready for you to work on by the time we meet.

I’m sure I will add more later. Please be sure to check with me if you have questions or concerns.

-Frederick Emrich

Reminder on Attendance and Submission of Material

Dear students: I see a need to remind people about policies on attendance and submission of material. To put it briefly, everyone participating in this course is required to attend all our course meetings and to submit all material on time. You cannot miss a class or miss a submission deadline without it having an adverse affect on our overall work processes (and on your final grade).

We only meet once a week and we must also contend this term with three concurrent weeks in which KIMEP is closed on our meeting day. Even were this not the case, attendance would still be required. But given that we have relatively few meeting dates, missing even one becomes that much greater a problem. Furthermore, because of the project orientation of the course, if you miss class or miss an assignment you not only miss things yourself, but you also let down your project colleagues.

If there is some urgent issue that prevents you from meeting these requirements, you are responsible for discussing that both with me and with your project colleagues in advance or (if that is impossible) within a day of the missed responsibility. Treat this course as if it were your work. It is.

I don’t like sounding authoritarian, but for a variety of reasons it is my responsibility to insist on these (and other) standards. Ultimately they are here to help us all succeed, both individually and as a group. If anyone has concerns about this, I am quite happy to discuss it with you.

-Frederick Emrich

Meeting for 8 February

Thanks to the group who put together a final proposal for today. (Though really a proposal for something like this is never final; it’s just an evolving plan for a continually evolving project…) This group is now a bit ahead of the game, seeing as a written revised proposal was not due until next week. Congratulations!

Today there are several items on the agenda (not necessarily in this order):

• Check in with project teams. Today I want to know for sure who is working on what project and to take some time to discuss plans with each group;
• Introduction to next planning steps: ongoing site reviews; making a visual site map; planning tasks, dates, and responsibilities; work management (you may use Basecamp for this if you wish), CMS selection, and site identity (site name and domain name);
• Move forward with CMS selection, part 1: I hope you had a chance to look at the example sites I listed on last week’s CMS post. If not, please look at them and I will also demonstrate how to locate exemplar sites. You should be trying to locate sites that might serve as examples for your work, including trying to see if you can figure out what CMS the site uses. We will talk about this more today;
• Move forward with CMS selection, part 2: Last week, technical difficulties interfered with the practical introduction I had planned for hosted versions of WordPress and Drupal. This week I will introduce you to each of those systems using my own personal website, and give you the opportunity to play with the systems a bit;
• A side note: Each project team is free to choose any CMS or web design platform. You may use WordPress.com, or hosted versions of WordPress or Drupal, or something else entirely. I am trying to give you a quick introduction to these systems (their advantages and disadvantages) and to offer guidance in using them, but ultimately you should make the decision about which you think may work best for you.
• In case you thought we weren’t going to learn about other tools: Last week I said we may begin working with audio today. Unfortunately, the computer people have not been able to set up the necessary systems for us yet (we are working on it). For next week, we will look at HTML and CSS (which will help you with your CMS’s). Please look over the sections in the J-Learning guide on that material for next week. I will identify a couple of tutorials I would like you to complete on your own before next week’s class, and provide you with links to those tutorials tomorrow (Friday). I will plan a few intensive workshops on tools in the coming weeks;
• Finally: We need to resolve how we will manage the three-week gap in our meeting schedule. I think we need to meet at least once during that time so as not to lose any momentum. We will discuss this tonight and come up with a solid plan no later than next week.

-Frederick Emrich

WordPress link
Drupal link

Final Proposal – “KIMEP Student Resources – on and off campus”

Final Proposal
 “KIMEP Student Resources – on and off campus”

Goal: To collect journalists work and assemble an online portfolio. These works would be our articles, photos, etc. which we are making during our study in journalism program and stories, which would be written about everyday life in Almaty especially for this course.

Off campus – It will consist of entertainment for KIMEP students – online webblogs of students life and cinema schedules, events and other entertainment means.
On campus – to present KIMEP Students with more news faster and probably help student organizations by covering them more in detail. Add new items like polls, comments and a more interactive forum too. Discuss KIMEP problems more openly. Online news briefs on a weekly basis.

The audience is going to be KIMEP Students. Also, our future employees, partners, students who want to join journalism program in KIMEP, teachers of other departments of the university and everyone who have interests in this field.

Regarding the information preferences there will be two main sections in this website Content: Our site will be divided into two sections.

Off campus, where articles on the issues about everyday life in Almaty and KIMEP. We also will post works that we made for other journalism courses if we decide would be interesting for our audiences and those works would represent the level of KIMEP’s journalism program. We will have links to other relevant sites that we find interesting and useful for the purpose of our site.

On campus, KIMEP Times articles. News briefs on organizations. News updates from different departments in KIMEP including office of register. Interactive forum where you can have a voice. 

Mission: We are looking forward to improve our writing and reporting skills by working in a group of journalism students. We will learn a lot through reading each other’s works. We will inform students, citizens and foreigners about what is happening in Almaty and KIMEP. We are looking forward to get lots of feedbacks from our readers. Design: We will make it clear and not complicated and not cluttered with too much information and pictures. For background we will use white color, which is said to be the best for this purpose.

The milestones for this particular website will be:For the Web site launch:

1. A whole issue of KIMEP Times.
2. Comments and Guestbook.
3. Student organizations pages. 
4. A discussion board – in a forum like manner.
5. Number of hits tracking system.
6. Entertainment guide for students off campus
7. Articles about students off campus
8. Pictures of students on and off campus
9. Small video clips about students life
10. Education abroad opportunities
11. Information about Language programs in Almaty

After launching this website we hope to have:

1. Regular news updates on student organizations and different departments of KIMEP
2. Advertisements with job offers
3. Education abroad program links
4. Link to Student Government Forum
5. Calendar of events ongoing in KIMEP
6. Tourism sites
7. Educational programs abroad – work and travel

DOs:
Make it simple and attractive
Easy to read and browse
Catchy photos and cartoons
User friendly

DONTs
Add too many things to click
Overload pages with too much data
Confuse the audience with the structure
Add pop-up advertisements
Make advertisements stand in the way and annoy the readers
Copy other – be unique!
Add very big audio files and big pictures – always reduce the size.

We hope we will learn a lot and have fun with this project. 

Madina Islamova
Mina Kim
Alina Palakina
Sasha Shegay
Denis Zhukov
Noor Alkhamees

Meeting on Planned Tuition Increase

The KIMEP administration will hold an open meeting on a planned tuition increase today (Wednesday 7 February) at 15.00 in Great Hall. All members of the KIMEP community are invited to attend.

Posting to the Weblog

I have noticed there are a number of entries (some of which look like they may be project proposals) saved as drafts on the site rather than actually being published. If you intend to save something as a draft, that is fine. But if you want your post to be available for reading, you must press the “publish” button at the bottom of the editing window.

When you write an entry, please be sure to actually look at the page you intended to post to in order to ensure it has been published. If not, open the draft again in the editing window and press “publish”. If you experience any difficulties with posting properly, please come talk to me about it.

-Frederick Emrich

Recommended Reading: Goodbye, Gutenberg

The latest issue of Nieman Reports, titled Goodbye, Gutenberg, features a series of articles on the impact of the internet and other new information technologies on the practice of journalism. I recommend browsing through these articles to get a sense of some of the major issues facing journalism in the new technological environment.

-Frederick Emrich

Moving Forward with Project Proposals

I was pleased overall with the initial proposals people produced and with our discussion of them in the meeting last Thursday. I am also glad to see people looking for ways to collaborate on projects. There is nothing written due to turn in this week, but please think about how you will refine your proposals to account for any changes you are contemplating.

First thing this Thursday, I want to know clearly which people are working on which project. Each project group should be working together to clarify the elements of the project overall and each participant’s role in the project. Use the J-Learning material as your guide for planning. You should also try to identify a few websites and/or publications to use as models for what you would like to do (and what you would like to avoid doing) as you proceed. Begin work on a site map.

This material should all be part of your revised proposals, which you should complete by 15 February. We will discuss this more in class this coming Thursday.

-Frederick Emrich

Eurasian Media Forum 2007

Some of you may be interested in the Eurasian Media Forum 2007, to be held in Almaty 19 to 21 April this year. The initial program topics listed on the website look promising and there are volunteer opportunities available (apparently, though the volunteer link on their site does not seem to work).

-Frederick Emrich

i would like to create a site for people who are interested in photography. its desigh will be pretty simple balck and wight in order to not extract the attention from the main things. on the front page people will be able to find the list of names of photographers. if they choose one of them they will automatically go to the page with his portfolio (boxes of small poctures will appear/ if you click on one of it, the picture will become bigger). i would not like to use a lot of video and audio materials in order to save speed and time.

in addition there will be “search” function in order to save up the time of visitors.

As pattern could be used a site  proza.com.au

http://proza.com.ua/visions/kanadskij_klon.shtml

shegay sasha

KIMEP Times

Already spoke of this (KIMEP Times Online) but here is a quick outline of what we could possible do. Any ideas or comments about the paper are welcome

Cheers,
Noor

Content Management Systems

A Content Management System (CMS) is a kind of software that helps people, well, manage content. For our purposes, I am focusing on web CMS’s, systems that make it easy (in theory anyway) for users to post content to a website using relatively simple browser interfaces. WordPress, the system we are using for our course weblog, is a CMS.

Material users post to a CMS is collected and sorted by an online database, and it is presented using a system of templates (what WordPress and some other systems refer to as “Themes”) that control the way the website looks.

For online publishers (us), the advantages of using a web CMS include simplified posting, storage, and retrieval of information; relatively easy maintenance, and ease of access for users. In short, once set up, the CMS makes it possible for people to create, edit, or use information online without worrying too much about layout, coding, and other time- and energy-consuming details.

CMS’s range from simple to very complex and can cost anywhere from nothing to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Obviously for our purposes we prefer easy and cheap. But even given that requirement, there are still lots of systems to choose from and lots of things to think about in making a choice of systems.

Free systems have their limitations, of course, but lots of people find they meet their needs. The free hosted WordPress system we use, for example, has a fair amount of features, but does not allow editing of the theme unless you are willing to pay for the privilege.

If you have a web server account (or perhaps a dedicated server), you can download WordPress software and set up your own system that is much more flexible. Of course, that costs money and takes a bit more effort.

Blogging services and software provide enough features to meet many people’s publishing needs (including many journalists and organizations). For example, look at these sites, run with WordPress software (though they are hosted elsewhere):

• neweurasia.net
• Newswatch India

Mindy McAdams uses the free Blogger system for her Teaching Online Journalism weblog.

Drupal is a somewhat more complex CMS, though like WordPress it is also available for free download. Some sites using Drupal are:

• OnTheCommons
• Bluffton Today
• Yelvington.com

Other CMS-using projects worth looking at:

• Global Voices Online
• NewAssignment.net
• Huffington Post (using MovableType)

When thinking what CMS to use, consider:

• What resources do you have? (Money, skills, time, etc.)
• What do you want to accomplish right now, and what are your long-term goals?
• Which systems have a good balance in terms of the resources they require and the possibilities they deliver?
• Look long and hard at other sites (look at what they do and try to find out how they do it, including the tools they use)

OpenSourceCMS is a very useful site that lets visitors “test-drive” open source (“free”) CMS’s. It is an excellent resource.

Online Journalism Review has some good articles related to CMS’s (see especially, “Time to Check: Are You Using the Right Blogging Tool?”), website design and newspaper blogs. (Browse their other resources as well.)

A more dense article is OpenAdvantage’s review of open source CMS’s.

This is just a start. There is lots more to learn about Content Management Systems. But the good news is that it is possible to begin relatively simply. Probably the best thing to do is to look around and see what other people are doing, and to try out a few systems and see what they can do.

-Frederick Emrich

Site Proposal

Good day everybody!
I think that our site must contain information for journalists, and have news from all over the world, as category “World news” and also “Central Asia news”, because in our group study also international students, for example from Uzbekistan and they must find information from their own countries and publish them in this site. Also, like in usual web sites our site can have categories, like, “Health”, for example we can write about situation in Kazakhstan, what is going on in sphere of health in this country.
Category “Music” is very interesting, because in Almaty each month come artists, from Russia and other countries. I think this will be very interesting if somebody from our group will write about such kind of events.
Category “We in faces” will contain from photos and biographies of our group.
Category “Have idea?” can help to our site, guests who come to our site can do proposal for our site or give useful information about what about write or give news that happened in Kazakhstan,for example.
Category “Photos” is one of the main ideas for site.
Here we can publish photos which we did during our study and finding or writing stories for our site. For example, i will go to concert here in Almaty, where i can do pictures from this event and publish them in this category.
What do you think about these ideas?

Kamila

SITE PROPOSAL [Assignment #2]

Goal: 

To collect all our journalistic works and make a kind of on-line portfolio. These works would be our articles, photos and other stuffs, which we are making during our study in journalism program and stories, which would be written about everyday life in Almaty especially for this course.

Audiences:

Our future employees, partners, students who want to join journalism program in KIMEP, teachers of other departments of the university and everyone who have interests in this field.

Content:

Our site will be divided into three parts – which will be consisted of each member’s works. We will post articles on the issues about everyday life in Almaty and KIMEP. We also will post works that we made for other journalism courses if we decide would be interesting for our audiences and those works would represent the level of KIMEP’s journalism program. We will have links to other relevant sites that we find interesting and useful for the purpose of our site. Our site will be in English.

Mission:

We are looking forward to improve our writing and reporting skills by working in a group of journalism students. We will learn a lot through reading each other’s works. We will inform students, citizens and foreigners about what is happening in Almaty and KIMEP. We are looking forward to get lots of feedbacks from our readers.

Design:

We will make it clear and not complicated and not cluttered with too much information and pictures. For background we will use white color, which is said to be the best for this purpose.

 We hope we will learn a lot and have fun with this project.  

Madina Islamova 20040475      

Mina Kim 20031349

Alina Palakina 20031611

Site proposal

Audience

Journalism students of Central Asian universities and journalists interested in online journalism and using informational technologies in their activity.

Preliminary users are ‘Beginners’ and our aim is to rise up their level to ‘Power users’.

 Purpose

To create a platform for young journalists from Central Asia to develop and improve their skills, both professional and technical, in order to integrate to online global society.

 

 Mission

Our mission is to create a team of young journalists from Central Asia able to concur with successful western journalists by encouraging them in developing professional skills, covering actual social issues and implementing new approaches in journalism activity.

 

 Content

The site consists of several main sections:

News – any kind of news related to site mission that site administrators and users find important and necessary to share.

Online master-class – here users may get information about western-style of writing news stories and feature stories. Professors of journalism department will be main consultants of running this section.

Ads – info about seminars, scholarships, workshops, exchange programs and so on.

Blogs – blogs of stories’ authors, site creators, users, journalists.

  

Milestone

A short-term milestone list for web-site launch

·          set up a content management system

·          get 10 stories related to site content

·          prepare calendar list of actions and events

·          develop a strategy of running this site

·          install a feedback system

·          set up an online polling system

Our team that consists of three students at the moment has a vision of this site. We also have some contacts from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan that will help us to run this site and add more useful links and sources for the site users. Moreover, we expect that some international and local organizations working in journalism field will also encourage our efforts. We need to know more about site managing system and implementing other kind of technical recourses that allows using multi-media to make this site useful and working.

   

Shodiyor Eshaev

Zarifa Tajiyeva

Soleh Yahyayev

    

ASSIGNMENT #2 Site proposal.

The main goal of creation the site is to communication between writers, photographers and people who will use this site. Communication will go through articles, photos which were published. The site will orient to inform audience about political, economic and cultural events (international and local). Also this site should be good informative base for people.  Our audience can be everyone, who is interesting what is going on in the world. If you want to read articles it will be free with out any registration and fees, but if you want to publish your article or photo you should register. Registration will be simple, just several questions about gender, male, age, email, nick name and also name.  

The mission is gather information and inform audience. 

The site will contain several pages. Each page will contain particular information. For example home page, here you can register, see some advertising, hot news list. Then news page where you can find last news which happened. And others pages.

By Denis Zhukov

Assignment #2 (Assel Aimbetova)

The purpose of creation of a site is dialogue with a wide audience by means of the publication of various articles on actual themes of a social-political life of a society, which during the given period of time are very interesting to an audience. The site also should be interesting to professionals of journalistic community, and also to those who only is going to become the journalist. It is connected with fact that founders of the site are not full members of journalistic communities yet.
The site should consist from five sections: “Home page”, “About us”, “Documents”, “Feed back”, “Miscellaneous”, and “Articles”.
Section: “ Home page ” should have links with all other sections of a site. Here it is expedient to write the following: “ This site is created by the future journalists, here you can find much interesting articles on vital topics, and also enter with us discussion ”.
In section “ About us ” there should be information concerning our group, which has created the project. Such information, as what is the purpose for created a web-site, date of its creation, how many person participated for it, their names, both their e-mail contacts and phone numbers.
Journalistic articles should be published in section “Articles” on various themes, which will be interesting for whole community.
In section “ Feed back ” should be placed comments of visitors of the site, concerning the site and the material placed on it. It will be pertinent discussions on various themes. Themes of discussion should be updated each time, and it should be like “ hard news ”.
In section “Documents” various acts, codes, charters and other documents, which regulate fundamental laws and duties of the journalist, both within the limits of the country, and at the international level should be placed. For example, the Mass Media Law, the Ethical code of the journalist, etc.
In “Miscellaneous” section various information concerning current activity of journalists should be placed: announcements about forthcoming press conferences, journalistic competitions and other actions.
As a whole the site should be very colorfully and is brightly issued, that will help to draw attention of visitors of a site. On the main page, expediently, to put a group photo of founders of a site.

Journalism Student Weblog Competition

I received this information from Leila at neweurasia.net:

“Journalism students who enjoy utilizing new media can enter a competition for the best student news Web log or “blog.” Application deadline: May 1.

The competition is being organized by the Journalism Development Center (CFJ in French) and the Cable News Network (CNN). The main aim of the contest is to encourage young journalists to utilize new technologies in their work.

The winning blogs will be selected for the quality and originality of their content as well as their design and functionality. The blogs can be in published in English or French and the best two sites will receive awards.

Entrants must have been under 30 years of age on December 31st, 2006 and enrolled on a journalism course at a recognized institution.

Interested participants should complete and submit the online application on the competition’s Web site and attach a copy of their C.V. and a letter certifying they are a student.

For more information, visit http://www.cnnblogawards.com/aboutawards.php .”

Initial Proposals and Meeting Plan for 1 February

Don’t forget: Please post your initial site proposals by today (Wednesday 31 January) so that everyone will be able to read all the proposals before our meeting time on 1 February.

Remember that these are initial proposals only. At this point a proposal does not commit you to actually doing the project you outline. It is a working draft for discussion.

Before our Thursday meeting, be sure to read everyone else’s proposal. Think about what might work in that proposal and what might be tricky. Consider whether you have seen other sites that do what is suggested in that proposal.

During our meeting, each participant will briefly (about five minutes) present his or her proposal and we will discuss it as a group. The idea here is to offer constructive feedback, raise questions, and so on. During the presentations, consider which of the projects appeal to you most. It is a lot of work to actually set up a good website, and the more we can work in groups on our projects, the better for us all.

After every proposal has been discussed, we will take a break. During the break, take time to talk with people whose projects appeal to you and see whether you might collaborate. We will discuss this a bit more upon returning from break, and I hope we will begin to see some project teams forming.

In addition to this project planning work, I will introduce you to content management systems and the OpenSourceCMS site.

-Frederick Emrich