My Final Exam

I did good.

Having fun with Google Maps

Yippee

Getting Your Blog to Rank Higher on the OSE

The OSE (Optimized Search Engine) is an important tool to get web traffic directed to your site. It will search for key words within an article you wrote and then compare them to see if they fit the requisits given to the search engine. And if you are a web journalist this is absolutely vital.

Why?

Well, you want to get recognized don't you? You might have an amazing article but no one will read it because they can't find it. The internet is pretty big, and truthfully the topic of your article will probably be covered by billions of other people too. Also most news sites get their main traffic through OSEs, like Google.

Of course, you can't just use popular keywords to get your article out there. That's only a first step. The next step is getting your work to rank higher in the OSEs list of results.

For example, you might be searching for "Oompa-Loompa Land" and once you typed those words into the Google search box and clicked enter you'll get an infinite amount of results. Chances are you will click on a link on the first page rather than go to the 48th page of results. Am I right?

So that your blog ranks higher on the search engine list you have to get people to link to your article. That will increase popularity and the value of your article.

So get cracking and use the Google Adwords (a site that tells allows you to know which are the keywords that are trending right now). And be sure to link to this blog post :)

Cheers!

CSS + HTML = Computer Gibberish

For all of us who stared blanky at the screen looking at characters like,

< href="www.wedineinhell.com/ ohmygod/help.jpg">this is torture < /a>


all I have to say is...I feel your pain.

Well, I felt your pain. Yeah, I'm spelling it in the past tense. Why? Cause I'm not in pain anymore. I think...

Anyway, I understood some concepts of HTML and CSS and it ain't gibberish to me anymore. Shall I share? Of course I should. I learnt that sharing is good in kindergarten. Might as well apply that basic knowledge in college.

First off, How do I link pages together so that they all work when I click on them?

http://www.monkeychews.com/. That's an absolute address or link. In other words it will take you directly to that website.

Then there will be other links on that main page that will lead you to other sub pages. For example the button "About MonkeyChews" will have a link that looks like this: www.monkeychews.com/about.htm and you'll get to read all about the MonkeyChews (it a real cool pub in London by the way. A must go and visit.)

If you simply wrote into your browser about.htm that's a relative link. It would work if you were already within the MonkeyChews website but if you were still on Blogger it would take you nowhere.

Now for the juicy stuff...

HTML is used to give your website the basic structure needed to function.
CSS is used to make it more aethestically pleasing. It has more functions and is usually used to compliment an HTML document.

There's three types of CSS styles one can use:

• Inline (allow for the customization of an individual element and override all other CSS types)
• Embedded (are put in the part of the html document)
• External

Unfortunately there's not much I'll be learning of CSS apart from that so you'll have to look into it on your own.

Of course you can always cheat and use Dreamweaver :)

Getting Blog Attention

Since we're going to dive into the blogosphere of online journalism we might as well learn about the basic tools we'll need to survive.

From what I learnt in class, Professor Hatch mentioned a few important concepts. Let's summarize shall we?

• FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a good way to transfer large files such as video and graphics over the web without clogging up e-mails. USBs are also handy.




• HTML will help you configure your webpage and organize it's content into something user friendly to other people on the Internet.

Of course there is more, but I thought these were the most important points. How does this relate to online journalism you ask?

Well, if you want to have a blog that is interesting you might consider using some graphics. For that you will probably need FTP and HTML to organize data (such as changing the size of your image, making sure that your content is structured correctly, uploading and transferring a large file that you might use for your article...).

Compare this blog screenshot:


















With this blog screenshot:













Who's would you feel more inclined to reading? See? That's why you should get to know your web tools. Here's an easy HTML Tutorial. And here's Filezila: an FTP service.

Good Luck!

iBlog. Do you?

Welcome to the era of user-generated content. Welcome to my blog and my introduction into the world as an online journalist.

It's marvelous that you popped by. Please, do take a seat!

... - oh wait. You're already seated. Silly me. How could I forget!

Now a days you don't have to get up to know what is going on in the world. With the Internet providing access to online news, online papers and multiple blogs, information, both biast and unbiast, are reachable at the click of a mouse. Wonderful isn't it?

Just take a look at Paul Krugman's blog which he posts on the New York Times called "The Conscience of a Liberal". It talks about economics, which is a subject I never understood. But thanks to his clear, even-a-person-who-doesn't-know-what-a-stock-is-will-understand writing style, I can happily grumble about the recession over tea and muffins to my economic-concious Grandfather.

I think as online journalists and bloggers we should strive to produce a blog like his. Something that is informative, but has a valuable opinion (in Krugman's case his opinion is EXTRA valuable. He's a nobel prize winner afterall).