"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
FREE website-building tools I use, ignore the elephant in the corner
I've seen a few people on Evoke talking about their visions for things that can be done online, and looking for ways to achieve them. I decided to post this for the benefit of anyone seeking help with a web project. Feel free to contact me if you have questions.
I was surprised to learn recently that you don't need any programming or design skills to build a website that can do (almost) everything facebook or Evoke can do. And very often the tools you need are available for free from a huge community of people who will respond to your requests and help you if you have problems.
There are various systems out there, and I use one called Joomla. This is free software developed under an open-source license and once installed on your server (ten minutes) it does most of the work for you. There are thousands of add-on toys which make it possible to do quite amazing things.
If you want to build a website, then this may be the best way to go about it. Not only do you get the benefit of everyone else's work, if you come up with something cool and useful then you can share it with the community and enable others to find new applications for it.
Example sites:
To begin with, you have to understand that a website has three basic qualities: design, content, and functionality. These three are not wholly independent of each other, because the artwork used in your design could also be considered as content. Words, photos and video are content, but the ability to put them onto a website (or allow your users to do the same) is a functionality. Managing a database is a functionality that results in content being output, and the way you present the content is also design. Clear? It's not as complex as it sounds once you try it.
Joomla is a program that manages your content, and uses a 'template' to take care of the design. There are thousands of templates to choose from for free, and you can also customise them by adding your own images, or you can hire someone to make one for you. To add/change templates, you just point and click. No programming required.
To add content, you just type into a box in the same way you do to add a blog post to Evoke. To upload video or photographs is just as easy. So content and design are simply not a problem.
To add functionality, you search the directory to find something that sounds like what you want and then download it. Then go to your website admin panel and click 'install'. After installing the tool, you select the options you want from its control panel, and it appears on your website exactly where and when you tell it to.
Examples of functionalities you can add are:
There is a completely free toy called Madblanks that enables you to ask people questions and do all kinds of cool things with their answers. (Although he's a geek and his site is very ugly he is really good at the technical stuff of how to do whatever it is you want to achieve.)
You can even decide which question to ask next, depending what the answer to the previous question is. One person suggested using this feature to make a decision tree or learning process. You can include video or pictures with each question, so in theory you can show something to someone and say "what do you want to do now" - this is soooo much more useful than just giving people instructions. You can let them experiment with different outcomes and really learn, plus you can collect and analyse their responses to try and learn something.
I'm still learning to use it, and my site is not really finished yet, but here's an example of something I made using a video from TED.com:
http://www.nupotato.com/tedsol/120-simple-technology-to-save-babies...
Some features are:
I was surprised to learn recently that you don't need any programming or design skills to build a website that can do (almost) everything facebook or Evoke can do. And very often the tools you need are available for free from a huge community of people who will respond to your requests and help you if you have problems.
There are various systems out there, and I use one called Joomla. This is free software developed under an open-source license and once installed on your server (ten minutes) it does most of the work for you. There are thousands of add-on toys which make it possible to do quite amazing things.
If you want to build a website, then this may be the best way to go about it. Not only do you get the benefit of everyone else's work, if you come up with something cool and useful then you can share it with the community and enable others to find new applications for it.
Example sites:
To begin with, you have to understand that a website has three basic qualities: design, content, and functionality. These three are not wholly independent of each other, because the artwork used in your design could also be considered as content. Words, photos and video are content, but the ability to put them onto a website (or allow your users to do the same) is a functionality. Managing a database is a functionality that results in content being output, and the way you present the content is also design. Clear? It's not as complex as it sounds once you try it.
Joomla is a program that manages your content, and uses a 'template' to take care of the design. There are thousands of templates to choose from for free, and you can also customise them by adding your own images, or you can hire someone to make one for you. To add/change templates, you just point and click. No programming required.
To add content, you just type into a box in the same way you do to add a blog post to Evoke. To upload video or photographs is just as easy. So content and design are simply not a problem.
To add functionality, you search the directory to find something that sounds like what you want and then download it. Then go to your website admin panel and click 'install'. After installing the tool, you select the options you want from its control panel, and it appears on your website exactly where and when you tell it to.
Examples of functionalities you can add are:
- all kinds of stuff to enable you to have a community with user points and so on
- directories of businesses or products
- online stores, paypal
- calendars, event management
- advertising services, similar to craigslist
- widgets to tell people about weather, sunrise, moonphase, earthquakes, stock market prices, or any other info that can be pulled from another online source.
- your own currency
- paid access to restricted content
- discussion forums
- google ads, analytics, etc
- my favourite..... surveys and quizzes
There is a completely free toy called Madblanks that enables you to ask people questions and do all kinds of cool things with their answers. (Although he's a geek and his site is very ugly he is really good at the technical stuff of how to do whatever it is you want to achieve.)
You can even decide which question to ask next, depending what the answer to the previous question is. One person suggested using this feature to make a decision tree or learning process. You can include video or pictures with each question, so in theory you can show something to someone and say "what do you want to do now" - this is soooo much more useful than just giving people instructions. You can let them experiment with different outcomes and really learn, plus you can collect and analyse their responses to try and learn something.
I'm still learning to use it, and my site is not really finished yet, but here's an example of something I made using a video from TED.com:
http://www.nupotato.com/tedsol/120-simple-technology-to-save-babies...
Some features are:
- As you can see, there is a message in red that disppears after you login.
- The video is hosted by youtube
- After answering the warm-up questions, there are some more difficult questions appearing in the same space without needing to reload the page.
- The warm-up questions are multiple-choice, the next set require you to type the right word.
- The survey questions produce pie charts showing the results from all the people who answered.
- The 'score' thingy (still a bit ugly) adds together all the results from all the different question sets on the page - or from anywhere on the website if required.
- There is a comments feature too, which is only visible to registered members but can be set to public.
Views: 18
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Comment by PJE on April 10, 2010 at 3:14pm
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nupotato is very good and you make building a website look possible which is fairly miraculous as Sarah Shaw Tatoun had to show me how to make links which worked a few weeks ago
Thank you. I hope more people see this
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Comment by Samiran Roy on April 10, 2010 at 3:24pm
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Thank you so much for this! I wish I could award you more points...
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Comment by Sarah Shaw Tatoun on April 10, 2010 at 3:44pm
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Wow, Chris-- joomla is available from my webhost but I had no idea what it was. Thanks for this explanation! Guess I've got a bunch of research and work to do...
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Comment by Mark Mulkerin on April 10, 2010 at 3:58pm
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@Chris and Sarah, Joomla is great. I use it for our family and farm websites. The only caution for Sarah is that you do have to know something about cascading style sheets and php if you want to really customize your look and feel. If you can find a look and feel that some else has already done, then I agree it doesn't require programming knowledge. Thanks for sharing.
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Comment by Ursula Kochanowsky on April 10, 2010 at 4:07pm
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Cool! I went there but I haven't felt up to really dive in head first.
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Comment by Ethan Walden on April 10, 2010 at 4:13pm
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I suggest you all take a look at Rhiza/Maya Labs
"Information commons", it works with Joomla too
http://www.rhizalabs.com/about/infocommons/magic/
That's what E4E/Delta Team will use as a platform,
because it's the state-of-the-art.
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Comment by A.V.Koshy on April 10, 2010 at 4:17pm
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i've used joomla and ning - now there are so many out there, actually i found groupsite pretty cool
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groupsite is where we have evokeforever
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Comment by Chris Ke Sihai on April 11, 2010 at 3:15am
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I'll try and find time to set up a public access joomla site for people to play with.
Comment
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