http://rodeworks.com

This blog is just here as a test.

Again from lullabot.com here is part 2 of their drupal introduction.

http://www.lullabot.com/files/audiocasts/LullabotPodcastNo3.m4a

The http://lullabot.com web site is a great source of audio and video content regarding the use of Drupal.  Here is part 1 of a two part series.

http://www.lullabot.com/files/audiocasts/LullabotPodcastNo2.mp3

In class this week I gave the students and assignment to research Creative Commons, and comment on it.  It may seem like a funny topic for a web design workshop, but I think it important that these artists understand the implications of what happens to their creative output when placed on line.  It also gives them a reason to create a blog post and comments on other’s posts. 

One of the comments was very skeptical of Creative Commons, and questioned strongly why it was even needed.  I was taken aback a little, as it never occurred to me that they wouldn’t take to the idea immediately.  She even suggested that the use of it seemed trendy!  Yikes, I thought, how am I going to respond to this in our in-class discussion?  I started working through what I know of the problems with the idea of fair-use (its ill defined and publishers often err on the side of wanting use-permission from the copyright holders), the weird retroactive copyright granting contained in the 1978 regulations, and the whole issue of derivative works (which is a lot of what theater/performance art is all about) and I said to myself — whoa!  This is all sounding nuts, it can’t be this bad.  So I did a quick little bit of fact checking, and you know what?  It is this bad.  And trendy or not, I’m even more convinced of the need for licenses like Creative Commons. 

And we had a great discussion in class.  I actually had to cut it short because we had a lot of web design stuff we had to get to.  By the end I don’t think we really had any firm consensus, but everyone did see the issue as much more complex than they had at first thought.  Leave them curious, and wanting more — that’s not such a bad learning experience!

U.S. Copyright Office – Copyright Basics (Circular 1)
IT Conversations: Lawrence Lessig – The Comedy of the Commons

Host Rocket is my web hosting company.
I’ve used them for several sites and found them to be very reliable, well priced.  They also offer scripts for WordPress and other popular blogging packages.  When I last checked the only issue is that they installed an older version of WordPress, but once loaded it isn’t a huge pain to upgrade it yourself.  You can also buy your domain name directly through them, and again the price is very reasonable.

Webmonkey has been around since the beginning of the HTML world, and was THE place to go for mini-tutorials on the cutting edge of web design.  Its demise has been announced several times, and many of the articles are showing their age, but it still seems to getting new content.  Perhaps not as fresh as in its hey-day, but still a great place to poke around for ideas.

Webmonkey: The Web Developer’s Resource

Webmonkey | authoring : html_basics

If you need to do a web site evaluation or planning document this is a great place to get started.  It lays out all the steps and provides a template of what a final document could look like. 

Information Architecture Tutorial

And a good introduction to web graphics

Web Graphics Overview

There’s plenty more at the site too.  Check the dates — tutorials from 1998 may not represent the standard practices in use today, but especially at the basic level much of it is still relevant.

The copyright laws that took effect in 1978 are far reaching and give a great deal on control to the work creators.  Some people, like Lawrence Lessig, have argued that the law puts too much restriction on content, and is having a broad impact on our culture.  Here are the regulations in their basic form:

U.S. Copyright Office – Copyright Basics (Circular 1)

Here is an interesting talk by Mr. Lessig on the topic of intellectual property rights, well worth a listen.

IT Conversations: Lawrence Lessig – The Comedy of the Commons

As I mentioned in class Lawrence Lessig is one of THE resources in the discussion of copyright and other intellectual property issues. Take a look at this book if you get a chance:

== Free Culture / Free Content ==

Chapters of the book are also available as audio files, so you can download it to your mp3 player and listen to it walking down the street!

Downloadable audio book –requires bit torrent client

Individual MP3 files

Yankees at the Yankees

Originally uploaded by rodeworks.

And here is the same image now hosted on flickr

Here is an image that I've uploaded to my blog site.