Month: June 2019

👓 Domain Name | Extend Activity Bank

Read Domain Name by Tricia BonnerTricia Bonner (Extend Activity Bank)

Wow, some great stories for your names. Thanks for sharing.

Similar to Nell I could not come up with something unique. This is a very very new venture for me and right now it is really about the learning so I simply went with TriciaB – it is how I am known through my circle of friends as there are two Tricia’s. I am hoping maybe it will catch on like Mel B did for the Spice Girls. I wish I could some up with something a bit more interesting but for now that is it.

👓 Learning for Growth | Extend Activity Bank

Read Learning for Growth by Lisa KosterLisa Koster (Extend Activity Bank)

I completed Domain Camp last year and I found it quite rewarding. I am still agonizing over the right “home address”.  I chose the name learn4growth because I believe when we learn new things, we grow as a person, both personally and professionally.

Last year we made all kinds of cool subdomains and pages.  So my work from last year is a bit of a mess.

My goal this year is to start to develop a long term plan for my site.  I am thinking I will start by putting all my work in a subdomain: camp2019.learn4growth.com

Nothing is there at the moment, but I look forward to populating it!

Looking forward to sharing!

Lisa

👓 What’s in a Domain Name? | Extend Activity Bank

Read What's in a Domain Name? by Eleanor K CassEleanor K Cass (Extend Activity Bank)

I’ve been enjoying the stories of how people chose their domain names.

I got my first domain less than a week ago but I agonized over the name for ages.  In the end, I was influenced by the idea that your domain is a bit like your email address or home address (I was introduced to domains by the friendly IndieWeb community) so I went with something that was close to my own name.

I often go by the nickname “Nell”.  I’m Eleanor Katharine and my middle name comes from my Granny Kit who died when I was 3 and who I have always wished I could have known.  Plus, well, Kat = critters.  Critters are fun and it all rolled off the tongue…

👓 What’s In a Domain Name? | Extend Activity Bank

Read What’s In a Domain Name? by Khürt WilliamsKhürt Williams (Extend Activity Bank)

Although I don’t write much about the topic on my website, I love science fiction, especially cyber-punk and Japanese anime and superhero graphic novels. One of my favourite cyberpunk novels in the early 1990s was a novel, Islands in the Net, written in 1988 by science fiction author, Bruce Sterling.

Islands in the Net is a story of “…data pirates, mercenaries, nanotechnology, weaponry, and post-millennial voodoo”. It represents a future where people can use the Internet to topple governments, change lives and make history. That novel was prescient in many ways.

In 2001 I ventured out on my own as an independent consultant, working on web development and system integration etc. It was also the same year that I started blogging. In 2003, I made a pivoted my skill set to cyber-security. With my keen interest in vulnerability assessment and finding and exploiting the weakness in information systems (aka penetration testing), my blog content changed. I started thinking and writing more about what I was learning, and I felt like I was living in that world described in the novel, Islands in the Net. It was also the same year that I decided that I wanted a domain name for my website.

My new career in cyber-security and my search for a domain name got me thinking about how I felt about my writing at the time. My blog was/is like a small island in the vast ocean of the Internet, where I shared my thoughts about anything and everything hacking related. Once I had the word island on my mind, I started thinking about the actual island in the West Indies where I was born and spent my pre-adult years. The West Indies is famous for its era of piracy which lasted from circa 1650 until the mid-1720s. Suddenly with my mind swirling with thoughts of the Internet, islands, and hacking, I remembered the Bruce Sterling novel.

The name of the blog, Island in the Net came to mind, and I went looking for a domain name. The domain, islandinthe.net was taken (and still is). I settled on islandinthenet.com.

🔖 Pravatar – CC0 Avatar Placeholder

Bookmarked Pravatar by Simon AsikaSimon Asika (pravatar.cc)
CC0 Avatar placeholders
This is a pretty slick little tool for generating random avatars when necessary.

Just to try it out, I’m using it for Simon’s avatar on this page, so refreshing the page should automatically change it.

Replied to Building a Front Entrance for Your Domain with Site Publisher (Extend Activity Bank)

ornate stone gate standing freely in a countryside field with the words domain.me superimposed on the bottom

A Domain of your Own gives you more than one web site you can put there, think of it as a plot of land with many different structures.

It’s useful to have an entrance gate or a simple “calling card” for the main URL of you domain (e.g. like extendlabs.ca). Later we will show you how to install blogs and other applications at different locations within.

Your web hosting cpanel includes an easy to use tool that will let you create your first web site just by filling out a few items in a form. These are simple, and probably in no time you will find them limiting. But for now, in a few minutes you can create something with information you choose to replace the temporary screen a new Reclaim Hosting domain provides you. Consider it as a placeholder for a fancier front entrance.

These are an interesting little side experiment for getting something quick and dirty up. I think they’d be more valuable as simple templates if they’d let one define some additional links like “Blog” with an icon and a field to redirect to a subdirectory or subdomain. I was also surprised that there were so many religious-related templates instead of educational ones.

My favorite was the Pravatar tool hiding in the lesson. I can think of lots of fun uses for a tool like this. 

My placeholder “site” lives at https://sp.chrisaldrich.net/.

🔖 ethicaledtech – Discussion list for ethicaledtech.info

Bookmarked ethicaledtech (lists.colorado.edu)
Discussion list for ethicaledtech.info
Subscribed!

Hat tip:

👓 The mindfulness conspiracy | The Guardian

Read The mindfulness conspiracy by Ronald Purser (the Guardian)
The long read: It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism

👓 Games and Graphics in Popup URL bars | Matthew Rayfield

Read Games and Graphics in Popup URL bars by Matthew Rayfield (matthewrayfield.com)
When I animated the URL bar with emojis I mentioned that I'd like to take it to the next level by putting a teeny game inside the URL bar. Well... Some really fine folks beat me to that. But I still wanted to give it a go ! I just needed to come up with something FRESH to work into it... So while thinking about how I could expand beyond the 1-dimensional movement of a URL bar, it came to me... Popups ! Yes, the bane of early 2000s internet will help me in 2019 achieve my emoji-url-bar-gaming dreams. By just opening a series of popups and overlapping them in a column we create a 2-dimensional display of sorts:

👓 Taking Sidwell Friends to the Supreme Court is about more than rich people problems | CNN

Read Taking Sidwell Friends to the Supreme Court is about more than rich people problems by David Perry (CNN)
A student can get a spectacular education at a wide variety of institutions, not just elite institutions. We are poorer as a nation when we spread myths that say otherwise, writes David Perry

👓 Meeting cpanel (and not getting overwhelmed) | Domains of Our Own

Read Meeting cpanel (and not getting overwhelmed) (Domains of Our Own)
Say hello to cpanel, the cockpit of your domain. Don’t worry about all the knobs and dials. Most of them you will never use, but the sheer number of them hopefully indicates the amount of power you have.
Replied to Adding a Self Contained Site with File Manager by Alan Levine (Extend Activity Bank)
Screenshot of sample basic calling card web page featuring a background with a 6 year old with his mouth agape.

Many of the sites we create in our cpanel are installed via a cpanel tool because they have complex file structures and often require database set ups. But there are quite a few web site themes that are all self contained HTML/CSS/Javsscript files that we can upload directly to our domain with the File Manager.

This activity walks you through the steps to put a self-contained web site within a directory of your site.

I created a sub-folder on my sub-domain and uploaded a simple templated HTML5/CSS website to create a simple calling card page at http://sp.chrisaldrich.net/me/. I couldn’t bring myself to replace the picture of the little kid with the gaping mouth because it was just too cute.

While I occasionally do some small uploading tweaks like this, it seems like ages since I created webpages like this outside of more elaborate content management systems. Hooray for raw HTML and CSS! It’s also a bit refreshing to do it all manually in an interface instead of via FTP or other means.