GOING ONLINE

1. GOING ONLINE Web 2.0

2. Outcomes: Objective 5: Students will develop effective communication skills and collaborative work practices leading to information and software technology solutions for specific problems.   5.1.1 selects and justifies the application of appropriate software programs to a range of tasks 5.2.1 describes and applies problem-solving processes when creating solutions 5.2.2 designs, produces and evaluates appropriate solutions to a range of challenging problems 5.2.3 critically analyses decision-making processes in a range of information and software solutions. 5.5.1 applies collaborative work practices to complete tasks 5.5.2 communicates ideas, processes and solutions to a targeted audience 5.3.2 acquires and manipulates data and information in an ethical manner 5.3.1 justifies responsible practices and ethical use of information and software technology.

3. What is Blogging Software Blog software is software designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of weblogs. As specialized content management systems, weblog applications support the authoring, editing, and publishing of blog posts and comments, with special functions for image management, web syndication, and moderation of posts and comments.

4. Advantages of Using an Online Blog Software • It Allows You to Focus on the Content • Posting an article is almost effortless. Compared to adding an article to thesitewizard.com, using an online blog software to post articles is like a dream come true. I only need to concentrate on the content of the article. The blog software automatically takes care of modifying the main page to include a snippet of the article and putting links to that article on the main, archive, category and tag pages. • You are essentially freed from the mundane nitty-gritty of adding articles, to doing the stuff that only you can do - writing content. • Automatic Generation of Site Usability Features • Unlike an offline web editor, where everything you want done on your site has to be added manually, blogging and CMS software handle things like tagging, categories and a managing a search engine for you. Simply tag your post as having a certain keyword, and a new index page is automatically generated for you with a list of posts that have that particular tag. There's no need to contemplate whether it is worth the effort and time to create a new page for that particular keyword or tag. The software does it for you. Your visitors automatically have the option, if they wish, to check out all the other articles having the same tag or keyword. • Likewise, adding a search engine to your website is no longer a hassle. In fact, the few popular blog software that I have tried automatically add a search engine for you whether you want it or not. • The blogging software automatically increases the usability of your website without adding complexity to your job as a webmaster. • Creation of a Community • If you use a blogging software, your visitors will be able to give their comments and interact with each other under each article you write. For some people, this is a significant advantage, since you can create a community of people around your site who will revisit your site regularly for updates. This loyal following also helps to break your site's dependence on search engines to send traffic. • Ease of Site Redesign • Unless your site is maintained using a sophisticated site manager like Dreamweaver's template system, or you dump all design elements of your web pages into server side includes, updating the design of your website is usually not a trivial operation. Even if you have a good search and replace utility, you still have to manually fix a lot of things if the individual pages on your site have some customized design elements. • Updating the site design when using a blog script or a CMS usually involves modifying the theme using the online software. Once you're done, all the pages on your website automatically reflect the changes

5. The Disadvantages of Using Online Blog or CMS Software • Potential Security Risks through the Online Scripts • While it's true that there are security risks in any type of website, having an online blog or CMS software installed on your site increases that risk. Such software are often complicated beasts with many modules performing different tasks. It is always possible that there is a security hole somewhere that the developer was not aware of. Since the software is on your website, open to the public, anyone who discovers a hole before the software developers fixes it can compromise your website and its data. • The risk increases if you are not up-to-date in upgrading your blog or CMS software. • The Inconvenient Timing of Upgrades • In general, upgrades can be a colossal pain in the neck. Online blog software developers release upgrades every now and then to fix security holes and other bugs. As mentioned above, for the blogger or CMS user, there is really no option other than to upgrade, otherwise your site can be easily compromised. Unfortunately, such security upgrades don't always happen at convenient times. Nonetheless, when they are released, it's in your best interest to apply them whether you are free or not. • It would be great if upgrading were easy. For the most part it is, particularly updates that contain only security fixes. Sometimes, however, an upgrade involves a modification to the theme files which control the website's design. Such modifications may or may not involve adding new features supported by the newer version of the blogging software. If you are anything like me, chances are that you would have customized the theme files so as to make them more search engine friendly. If you want your site to incorporate the new features, you will have to manually go through all the updated theme files to modify them to include your changes. Since you can never be sure whether an update to the theme impacts your site, you always have to perform this check on every upgrade. • The difference between such a situation and the normal one when you want to change your site design is that the latter takes place at a time you decide. Upgrades force you to take time out of your normal schedule to attend to things like this. • Unusable Site During Upgrades • While you are uploading the files to your website during an upgrade of the blog or CMS software, your site is basically unusable. If the updated software requires changes to the database, you have to run an upgrade script after uploading the new version of the software before your site will load correctly. Since upload speeds tend to be slow for most ISPs today, there is a large window of time, from the time you start uploading to the time you run the upgrade script to finalize the upgrade, where your website is unusable. If your site is a busy one, there will definitely be a period where the visitors reaching your site get a garbled or unusable site. • The Need to Deal with Comment Spam in Blogs • User comments on blogs can be a boon to your site as well as a hassle. It's great when genuine visitors leave their comments on your site, whether positive or negative. At least you know how people are reacting to your articles. But along with these legitimate visitors come bots and other webmasters that spam your blog with advertisements for their sites that, far from adding value, decrease the quality of your web page. Of course you can delete such comments. But this takes up your time. On certain blogs, the signal to noise ratio have become so low that the webmasters are forced to disable comments to cope, thus negating one of the advantages of using a blog software to create a community. • Mistakes are Immediately "Live" • When you redesign your website with the blogging or CMS software, you are redesigning it "live" on your site. Any mistake you make is instantaneously reflected across your site. With an offline web editor, you can preview your site with a browser to make sure it looks the way you intend before you release it to your visitors. • Limitations of the Software • In general, you also have to work within the limitations of the software. If your software does not have a particular feature that you want, you will not be able to have that facility on your site until the developers of the script implement it. • The Software Uses More Resources on Your Web Server • CMS and blogging software use more CPU, RAM and other resources on your web server. The software has to construct each page every time a visitor loads it, taking up valuable computational resources. On a high traffic day, not only will your site appear slow, it may also slow down all the other websites hosted on the same web server. If you are hosted on a shared web hosting plan, this often brings down a notice from your web host that you have exceeded the resource limits on the server, resulting in their recommending that you upgrade to a dedicated server.

6. What is Wordpress? • First developed in 2001 as a blogging system designed to enhance the typography of everyday writing, WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world and has evolved to be used as a full content management system and more, through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes now available. It is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. It is completely customizable and can be used for almost anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying any fees.

7. Features of WordPress • Full standards compliance- The WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. • WordPress Pages- Pages allow you to manage non-blog content easily, so for example you could have a static "About" page that you manage through WordPress. • WordPress Links- Links allows you to create, maintain, and update any number of blogrolls through your administration interface. • WordPress Themes-WordPress comes with a full theme system which makes designing your site simple. • Comments- Visitors to your site can leave comments on individual entries, and through Trackback or Pingback can comment on their own site. You can enable or disable comments on a per-post basis. • Password Protected Posts- You can give passwords to individual posts to hide them from the public. You can also have private posts which are viewable only by their author.

8. PROBLEM: Students in year 8 have been having trouble understanding key concepts of computing. To facilitate understanding you have been tasked with putting together resources to create a student support blog where students can collaborate their understanding with fellow students and teachers.

9. Conclusion • Now you should be able to post on blogs and add content and respond to other posts. • You can see your progress (and everyone else’s) by navigating to the relevant page on the blog! • Can you post a question that’s bugging you- and then can someone else answer it?

10. Resources • WordPress.com - Step-by-Step Tutorial on How to Blog- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWYi4_COZMU

11. Key Elements Use of the internet such as • Research Internet software such as • Authoring software World Wide Web (www) • Information medium for the dissemination of information • Interactive medium

12. Why we chose this Scenario: • It demonstrates something that students would encounter in every day life. • Blogging is a very useful skill regardless in this day and age. • Specifically, everyone doing education should be using Wordpress and this would provide a good opportunity to practice those skills. • This would help other students out with this particular assignment.