Rick’s Place
Notes, Thoughts, and Random Musings on the
Online Experience
It's 6 PM and a faceless modemer dials into an Internet provider. Using File Transfer Protocol, he logs onto a UNIX server in Indiana. He types in a few arcane commands, and within a half hour he possesses the complete score for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Pi to a million digits, various works of classic fiction, political papers, census results, the CIA World Factbook, the King James Bible, and some books about the Internet.Dave Kushal
Project Gutenberg and the Future of Publishing
http://promo.net/pg/kushal.htmlAs many of you are aware, this is a view of contemporary research by our students. Whilst we strive to make our “ancient” brains remember passwords, command keys, and which menu we have to open to get that to happen...no, no not THAT...that!, our students are confidently moving forward into the world of the web and beyond into the world of the Internet.
Last issue the Jazz Band site was used as an example of the power of the web as a publicity tool for you and your program. I checked the Jazz site as I sat down to write and it has now had over 2080 hits. To us this sounds amazing, because it is the equivalent in numbers for me of all of the the parents of all of the students at my school visiting the site twice...since October.
Now in the real world, we are talking peanuts here. A popular site in the commercial world may take 200,000 hits the first day and really popular ones sustain that traffic for months on end. But in our world, 2000 hits is a big deal. If we had a counter on the International Honor Band and Choir site, I would bet that it has already reached that level and surpassed it. The festival was a great happening with wonderfully musical results created by the two brilliant guest conductors harnessing all of that student power. The web view must have affected some of you, because many of you have taken the time to drop me a note and say what a good representation of the festival you found it to be.
I have put up a “Useful Page” on a free web service where I put pictures of the year’s events as they happen, rehearsal schedules, notes, etc as an extra way of communicating with the students and parents. It isn’t very flashy, but the words, “Look for your picture on the net...” make eyes start to shine brighter. Teachers at our school have access to a digital camera; Netscape Communicator now has a WYSIWYG web page creator built into it as does Internet Explorer Gold. The tools are there. Your IT person would have at least a trusty student who would either put it together for you or offer to teach you how to do it.Try this. Open up Notepad or SimpleText and type the following:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My First Page</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF">
<H1><CENTER>
<HR>
This is my first page of HTML.
<HR>
</CENTER></H1>
<H3><CENTER>Not exactly rocket science, is it?</CENTER></H3>
<CENTER><A HREF="http://www.bassetts.demon.co.uk/News.html">AMIS Web Site</A></CENTER>
<P> </P>
<P>
<HR>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>
Save the text file as first.html, close the text editor, then open up your file in your favorite Web browser. Easy, isn’t it?
Did any of you visit http://www.apple.com ? If you are running OS 9, Apple’s latest version of their operating system, you can register for a free iTools account giving you another mail address, 20 Megabytes of free web space, and a template based web page creation system where they will ‘hold your hand’ and generate all of the HTML code for you.
Visit the web site referenced at the top. The author was a ninth grader when he wrote it.
Rick may be reached at
[email protected]
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