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Department of Engineering |
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| University of Cambridge > Engineering Department > computing help |
A talk for young and old alike about some of the features you may want to add to your WWW pages, showing what they offer and how difficult they are to use. The locally available options for development/software support will be mentioned too.
On the WWW, possibilities and expectations are ever-changing. Not so long ago only nerds produced web material. Now there are allegedly over 500 million active Facebook users and over 150 million public blogs. Over half of our students use Facebook at least once a day. And let's not forget Twitter.
The gap between student and student expectations may be huge. If staff want to engage students they may need to use the [social] media that students use even if they don't speak their lingo. But even if web-authors don't want to undergo a culture shock of creating a blog, they can introduce more colourful or interactive features into their pages, and use non-University software to run surveys, arrange meetings, etc.
The University Computing Service now offer
Falcon and CamTools offer menu-driven ways to create and manage Web sites. If you want to (or have to) edit HTML code you'll need to know above many interlocking features. First, there's basic HTML and ways to enhance it - CSS and JavaScript.
Cascading Style Sheets. See our HTML4: Stylesheets page (or the css test page for some quirkier options - layers, HTML5 video, etc). You need to know a little about these if you're going to use the University house style. Even if you're only blogging it can help.
2 main types.
You can also embed Java Applets
We have a local facility but is it any use (caches, cheating)? See our documentation for details. We update monthly logs of most of our servers (visible only from within CUED). Other options include
Has always been a problem. Options include
The range of formats and browsers complicates the issue. See our Movie page. We have no general support for streaming, though the university has a facility - Streaming Media Service - that lets you submit movies and have them converted into a range of formats.
Local PIN/passwd protection is available for some of our servers - see our Access Control page. Alternatively, you might be able to protect some pages using the university-wide Raven facility. Shibboleth (an international facility) is gradually taking over.
RDF Site Summary? Rich Site Summary? Really Simple Syndication? A way for a site to broadcast a message (headlines, etc) so that other sites can embed it on-the-fly. You've seen the logo even if you've not explicitly used the facility
The above facilities provide features that can be put together to produce pages familiar to social networkers. Initially they required technical expertise. Now the facilities have been made easier to use and combine. The resulting paradigm is often called "Web 2.0". Software like Wordpress that once just let people produce blogs has been developed so that non-programmers can create pages using many of the above features. We don't offer a way to do this for general users within CUED, though the University's CamTools facility comes close. If that's not enough
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| | computing help | WWW | |