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Monthly Archives: December 2011
What about the Stop Internet Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA)?
Recently, a customer wrote in for more information on these two important pieces of legislation. Here’s the response from SWCP President Mark Costlow, that we thought was so good, it deserved to be posted: SOPA and PROTECT-IP are both very bad ideas. They are attempts to address something that is a real problem (theft of intellectual property) but they do it in such a flawed way that the cure would be much worse than the disease. One can argue back and forth about how much of a problem piracy really is. Both sides tend to blow their positions out of proportion. But giving people the power to turn off (read: destroy) web sites at will, without due process, is irresponsible and dangerous. The existing mechanisms for removing infringing material from the internet already have “baby vs bathwater” problems, and these bills would make it worse. Here’s one example. DMCA Takedowns are routinely used to remove videos from YouTube which are deemed to contain a media company’s copyrighted material, when in fact the usage is in a news or commentary context and therefore covered under the Fair Use doctrine. The harmed party can protest the takedown and get it reversed, but that process is lengthy. For someone who makes their living commenting on current events, the takedown essentially nullifies the content. It’s almost useless when they restore it 2 weeks later. Here’s a write-up of a recent case of this, but it’s … Continue reading
WordPress layout and flow
In the last article we talked about why you might want to use WordPress to build a website and a few of the key concepts, like static versus dynamic content, separation of content from look and feel and how important the flow of your website it to the customer’s experience. This article will show you in an example where you’d find the concepts we’ve been talking about. Overall page layout In a simple website your pages will be divided into several sections. Common ones are header, content, footer, and sidebar. Below are a couple of examples. Header Content and Sidebar Footer Blogging versus CMS In a pure CMS, (content management system) you have pages with information about your company, service, or topic of interest. They’re usually organized in a hierarchical arrangement and they have the feeling of a book with chapters and subchapters. A natural organization of a CMS is to have a main menu that links into different sections of the website. A blog is much more like a magazine. It’s very time sensitive. Articles are organized by topics, but also by when they are published. Generally the home page on a blog consists of excerpts of the last few articles published, and comments from readers regarding these posts. A natural organization of a blog is to have an archive linking to articles posted during a particular time period such as a month. Also organization by topic … Continue reading
Getting started with WordPress
The view from the sky Building a modern, professional looking website and keeping it up to date can be a challenge. There are tools that can take some of the tedium out of this process. One type of tool that is used more and more is the Content Management System (CMS). There are many varieties of CMS out there. Some are geared towards building a website for a certain type of business, like restaurants or real estate. Some are more general purpose. One that we’ve found really useful is WordPress. WP started out life as a blogging tool but has grown into something anyone can use to construct a useful and functional website. One key thing that a CMS will give you is the separation of look and feel from content. This allows folks with little website-building knowledge to easily add content to a website without breaking the site. While WordPress provides lots of tools for building a consistent, attractive website from scratch, it does take some time to get familiar with it. This series of articles will introduce you to the key elements of how WP works, and how to find your way around. These will all be at a fairly high level to get you familiarized with the basic concepts of a WP site. These are the articles I wish I had found when starting to work with WordPress. Website Structure Most modern websites can be broken down … Continue reading