Alec's Blog o' Random

Time to study for the World Literature II midterm! I’ll explain what every term you’ll need to know means completely. Might as well make it easy.

Let’s get started.

Dashboard: In WordPress, the ‘dashboard‘ is the main administration panel. You’ll find every tool to manage your blog on the Dashboard.

Aggregator: An Aggregator is in use with the popular ‘Google Reader’, which will take various RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds and show them to you in a easy to read format.

RSS: ‘Real Simple Syndication’. RSS is pumped out from blogs, which is then picked up into an easy to display feed, which is then in use with Aggregator’s.

Reader: Popular with ‘Google Reader’, they’ll display RSS Feeds from blogs in an easy-to-read format.

Feed: Usually relating to ‘RSS’, a Feed is a constant flow of new blog posts.

Google Alerts: A popular Google service, it’ll email you if a term, eg. ‘Alec Armbruster’ appears on a web page that was just added to the Internet.

Links: Also referred to as ‘HREF’, a Link is a clickable document written in HTML which allows you to easily access a new webpage. Used hand-in-hand with Pingbacks.

Pingback: When you post a new entry with a link in it (a link to a blog), the person you linked to will eventually get an alert that you linked to them. That’s called a Pingback!

How to insert an image: In WordPress, you’ll need to click the ‘ ‘, and you can upload the image. Pretty simple.

Upload: Up-load. You load something up. You can upload an image to a website.

Trackback: Very, very similar to a Pingback. It’s basically just different words for the same thing (Pingback vs. Trackback). It’ll notify the other blogger’s software that you posted about them in another method.

Post: An entry on a blog.

HTML: The code that your computer (or Web Browser, eg. FireFox or Safari) transforms into a web page.

Embed Code: HTML Code that you can insert into a blog. Eg., code block that’s provided from a web service. Think of when we added our Clustermaps. They gave us Embed Code to add to our blog.

Google Docs: A popular Google service, it’s a collaborative site to edit documents in.

Sue Waters: Our lord and savior. She’s one of the core founders of Edublogs. Popular blog analysis lady.

Sue Waters’ posting tips: Use short paragraphs, use headings, add hyperlinks (or Links), comment back always, and subscribe to your own feeds to see how it’s shown to others.

Edublogs: Popular student blogging website. Located at Edublogs.org.

Avatar: A small image that represents you on the Internet and your blog.

Comment Etiquette: Be specific, leave your own URL, don’t put anything that you don’t want to see in 5 years. You can’t ever get something off the Internet after it’s posted!

Permalink: The permanent link to a blog post. So others can find the specific post. The Permalink to this specific blog post on here is ‘blogging-terms’.

Hyperlink: Another word for ‘Link’. It’s like saying the word ‘Automobile’ instead of ‘Car’. More advanced.

URL: Same as above. Another word for ‘Hyperlink’ and ‘Link’.

Clustrmap: A popular blogging service that shows you where people are reading your blog. Sort of sketchy.

Sidebar: The bar on the side of your blog. It holds Widgets (but Widgets isn’t a term here).

Categories: The hierarchy that posts are put in. Self explanatory.

Tags: When you Tag something, you put it in an unofficial category. Sort of like Categories except it’s shorthand.

Wiki: A collaborative website, which allows anybody to edit the content. Eg. Wikipedia.

Terms that probably will be added but aren’t on it yet:

WordPress: Popular blogging software. Used for over 40% of the blogs on the Internet.

Widgets: A small amount of info or links on the side of a blog. Made popular by WordPress.

Comment: A reply to a post posted by the replier on the poster’s blog.

Theme: The layout of a blog.

Plugins: Modifications added to a blog via WordPress‘s software.

Revisions: A change to an already posted entry.

Moderate: To check and approve new comments written on your blog.

And that’s all! There might be some added in the future, I’ll try to keep it updated. Peace.

In response to Jonathan Greer’s post Half-Life 2:

Did you actually think the storyline of the game was good? It’s repetitive beyond belief, and you gave it a 10/10? The only reason the game is doing so well is because you have to buy it to play one of the greatest Sandbox games, Garry’s Mod. The only reason the game is so great is the art, the characters, the weapons. The storyline isn’t near as entertaining as other games (eg. Call of Duty, Gears of War [amazing game, by the way]).

But I’m also guilty for staying up ’till 5 in the morning playing HL2 with friends, or beating Gears of War 2 in ‘Hardcore’ mode in a day.

(YouTube seems to be blocked at the school.)

Trying is a good thing. When you try for something- you fairly always meet your goal. But there’s a point where trying goes over the line. Prime example: Microsoft vs. Apple. Steve Balmer vs. Steve Jobs. And I have proof to back up my example.

In the mid-80′s, the race to building the first non-command-line GUI-based Operating System was on. Sure, Linux was there all along, but money was also a factor.

Microsoft and Apple both had the same commercial budget. Want to see what they did to advertise?

There’s Steve Balmer. And yeah- he’s screaming like (RIP) Billy Mays.

Now, let’s look at Steve Job’s attempt at advertising. He did a public, televised press release for his new OS.

Sleazy vs. Elegant. That’s all I have to say.

I’ve taken the time to do a quick analysis of Ice Cube. But as we all know, Ice Cube’s DO melt! Let’s have a moment of silence for his career. I’m joking.

*IYWTBAR: If you want to be a Rapper.

Bill Gates always has something up his sleeve. No, it’s not loads of cash money, no, it’s not the world’s biggest residential house; it’s building competitors for already established companies.

Let’s take a look at the Zune. Apple, in the mid-2000′s, created the iPod. The word ‘iPod‘ is a commonly used term for almost anything that plays MP3′s. Zune, Microsoft’s attempted ‘iPod-killer’ is just another piece of Micro-poo that doesn’t work. Here’s why:

1. It’s only compatible with Windows.
2. It’s clunky, and it’s hard to use.
3. The designers failed at making it look ‘space-age’. If this was the 1950′s, it would of fit right in.
4. Windows Media Player is the only thing you can sync it in. Windows Media Player, or WMP is honestly universally agreed as one of the worst media platforms in computing history.
5. It has an unfinished, and unpolished interface.

That also explains why Apple’s iPod has a world of sales over Microsoft’s Zune.

Now, let’s see why Apple’s iPod is doing so well.

1. It works with both Windows and Mac (eg. iTunes).
2. The iTunes Store is brilliant and cheaper than WMP.
3. It has an easy, minimalistic, and polished interface.
4. It’s easy, and fun to use (eg. the scroll wheel).
5. It doesn’t try to impress people.
6. The new iPod touch and iPhone are now universally agreed as one of the best gaming platform in history, with the App Store getting over one billion downloads recently.

Hmm. So, we’ve already established that the iPod > Zune, thus, Apple’s attempt at MP3 > Microsoft’s attempt at MP3.

Now, let’s get on to our topic of Bing.

Bing, also said Bada-bing, bada-boom, is horrible. Sure, there’s supporters, but I’m telling you know that I’m not one of them.

I’m a student, and I enjoy using the Internet for various awesome things. Music, YouTube, Facebook is just a few of the things I visit and play daily.

In 1995, a guy named Larry Page met another guy named Sergey Brin, and they made magic. Nope, it’s not a fairy tale, it’s actually the story of Google. These two guys discovered the first usable search engine, indexing every webpage on the new Internet, making it a Library for finding things easily. Stanford not only played a role in this project, but when Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a check for $100,000, Larry and Sergey bought out. They founded the unheard of company named Google.

Google’s awesome. I use it all the time. Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, YouTube; the list goes on and on.

Yahoo! tried to go against Google in various cloning of applications, after being bought out by Microsoft silently. Yahoo!, regardless of it being owned by Microsoft, isn’t that bad. It kept a lot of non-Microsoft developed features once it got bought, hence, it’s still usable, like Flickr, and Yahoo! Weather.

About a year after Yahoo! got beat up by the Big Bully (eg. Microsoft), Bing was seen everywhere on TV. Yeah; Bill Gates sold his couch to buy a few hundred million dollars worth of advertising for Bing.

Here’s what Bing tries to do:

1. Be simple.
2. Be interesting.
3. Search for you.
4. Be ‘hip’.
5. Do stuff just like Google.

Here’s why I don’t care about Bing:

1. When I go to search, I honestly don’t want to take an extra few seconds to load an interesting picture. I want to find what I’m looking for.
2. I get a headache looking at it. There’s so much useless stuff going on at one point.
3. It mixes up the hierachy of search contents in a random order, with hard to read, orange text.
4. It’s slow.
5. The results honestly suck.
6. It’s filled with ads from top to bottom.

Now, to back up my thoughts, let’s search for ‘Will Smith’.

And then,

Google delivers content in the order you’d like to see it, whereas Bing is just a whole lot of results bunched together in no category. Google keeps it simple and easy, Bing does not.

So yet, Bing is yet another failed attempt to get anywhere near Google. Keep trying, Microsoft, keep trying.

Well, it looks like I’m writing a blog now. I’ll keep this updated with cool, and interesting, random facts to entertain just about anybody who wants to waste some time.

Expect a first post by Monday.

-A