Last updated 7-11-2001 Q1: Is it okay to use other peoples' literary work and qoutes? Is it copyright infringement? Is it valid to cite and copy new technologies, such as posting the layouts of a engine of some sort, as long as I give credit to the author or inventor? If not, what do I particularly have to do in order for it not to be infringement? Q2: I have a question for you concerning the compatibility of systems. One of the Administrators wants to put the newsletter for parents on line so it can be accessed by parents with computers. He wants to send it as an attachment to email. Is this the best way to do this? What compatibility problems will they run into? How accessible will this be to all systems? Any helpful suggestions? Q3: Where can I learn how to create a website for my school? Q4: How do I set up a private LISTSERV program (mailing list) for my students in my classroom? I want to use it for assignments, announcements, etc. From looking at your "Tools for TEKS", I assume that is what you have done. Q5: I took your "Creating a Claris Webpage" at the Technology Convention in Austin last Feb. I have been creating a web page and was not successful in inserting then resizing a photograph taken by a digital camera. The picture and color distorted if I reduced the percentage or pixel. The on line help said I should use a border. Can you tell me how with Claris HomePage? I am using The Front Page and it does not have borders. Should I insert the picture inside a cell to limit the size of the photograph? I appreciate your help since I don't know who/where to turn to. Q6: I want to know how to get a sound from a cassette tape onto a computer. Is it just a matter of recording? Also, how do I send sounds in email? I sent as an attachment but it was an .asf file and wouldn't play. Can .asf files be converted to midi's or wave's? Last of all, how do I put sounds onto the webpages? Q7: How do you get your webpage to automatically fit in a framed window, or to re-size itself? My boss uses the HISTORY attribute in Internet Explorer all the time, which takes up about a third of the screen, but would like our page to still fit in the remainder of the screen without having to scroll to see the rest of the page. Q1: Is it okay to use other peoples' literary work and qoutes? Is it copyright infringement? Is it valid to cite and copy new technologies, such as posting the layouts of a engine of some sort, as long as I give credit to the author or inventor? If not, what do I particularly have to do in order for it not to be infringement? A: Academic fair use law in the US permits you to cite and use others' ideas in your academic work as long as you cite it appropriately. A good site to read up on the topic is Stanford's Fairuse and Multimedia site: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/multimed/ A good cite called "Bibliographic Citations for the Digital Age" is also worthwhile on the topic: http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/hspls/bibcite.html Q2: I have a question for you concerning the compatibility of systems. One of the Administrators wants to put the newsletter for parents on line so it can be accessed by parents with computers. He wants to send it as an attachment to email. Is this the best way to do this? What compatibility problems will they run into? How accessible will this be to all systems? Any helpful suggestions? A: As to "putting the newsletter online," this usually means putting it on a webpage. In that case, all computers with internet capability would be able to display and print it. The simplest way to publish it would be to use Myrmidon (www.terrymorse.com), which automatically converts any document to formatted HTML. You can save Word files as HTML, but Word doesn't do nearly as good a job formatting it as Myrmidon. You can link to an example of our Rush newsletters published with Myrmidon at: http://www.lubbock.k12.tx.us/rush/newsletters.html If you want to send the newsletter out as an email attachment, your best bet for compatability would be to send it as an Adobe pdf file. Parents would need to download (or already possess) the free Adobe Acrobat reader. To create a pdf file, you would need to purchase Adobe Acrobat Pro. With this program on the mac, I merely choose "pdf" in the chooser instead of a printer, and can convert any document into a pdf file. Links to Acrobat Reader are available at www.wtvi.com/teks/tools.html Q3: Where can I learn how to create a website for my school? A: Check with your school district's technology office and your Regional Education Service Center for workshops available in your area. A complete, step by step tutorial for creating webapges with Claris Homepage is available at www.wtvi.com/html. If you are interested in having this workshop presented at your school, email me at wes@wtvi.com. Q4: How do I set up a private LISTSERV program (mailing list) for my students in my classroom? I want to use it for assignments, announcements, etc. From looking at your "Tools for TEKS", I assume that is what you have done. A: I have not actually set up a listserv, I just keep track of the email addresses in my Eudora address book. A free service is available to do listservs, however, and I am about to start trying it out for our school. It is located at: http://www.websitepostoffice.com/ If you try it, please let me know what you think. Good luck! Q5: I took your "Creating a Claris Webpage" at the Technology Convention in Austin last Feb. I have been creating a web page and was not successful in inserting then resizing a photograph taken by a digital camera. The picture and color distorted if I reduced the percentage or pixel. The on line help said I should use a border. Can you tell me how with Claris HomePage? I am using The Front Page and it does not have borders. Should I insert the picture inside a cell to limit the size of the photograph? I appreciate your help since I don't know who/where to turn to. A: I recommend you use a graphic program like GraphicConverter or Photoshop to resize an image. When you change the number of pixels for an image within a webpage program like Homepage, you are not actually changing the size of the image or the amount of disk space it takes up: you are just telling the browser to display it as a different size. So, you end up using images that are larger than you really need and take longer to load, which is inefficient. If you really want to resize images this way, make sure you do so proportionally so distortion is avoided. Example: if the original image is 200 x 130, a smaller image could be exactly half as big: 100 x 65. The image has a border if you specify it in the image options box that appears when you double click on an image in Homepage. I usually set the border of images to zero, so that if I make the image a link, a blue box does NOT appear around the image. This really comes down to personal preference. No, inserting an image inside the cell of a HTML table will NOT change it's size. Unless you change the default size of the cell, the cell will automatically expand to the size of the image. If you force the cell to be smaller than the image, then only a portion of the image will show. You need to use another program (a pixel based graphics program) to change image sizes. If you want to download a copy of GraphicConverter (for Mac), you can read more about it and link to a download page from: http://www.lemkesoft.de/us_gcabout.html It is $35 shareware, and is one of the best software programs I've ever used. One other alternative (which might be cheaper) is to use a pixel based painting program like the paint environment of Clarisworks to reduce your image sizes. You will probably lose resolution and picture quality this way, but you can copy an image into ClarisWorks paint and then use the tools to change the size/scale of the image. Copy the image again and paste it into Homepage, and Homepage will automatically convert it to a GIF image and let you specify where to save it and the file name. Q6: I want to know how to get a sound from a cassette tape onto a computer. Is it just a matter of recording? Also, how do I send sounds in email? I sent as an attachment but it was an .asf file and wouldn't play. Can .asf files be converted to midi's or wave's? Last of all, how do I put sounds onto the webpages? A: The easy but not so great quality way convert casette tape recordings to digital (computer) sound clips is to buy a microphone and then record what you want into HyperStudio (www.hyperstudio.com) or another application. In HyperStudio you can choose "Sound is stored in a separate file" when you record it. You can then use a freeware/shareware application to convert that sound file into whatever format you need. To send files in email, you need to convert them to a format everyone can hear. WAV format is pretty good and works cross platform. Try searching www.download.com or www.shareware.com for "WAV" and you should find some programs that can convert sound files from one format to another. Almost all computers will be able to play WAV files without people having to download a separate player. You should be able to convert .asf files or anything else into WAV files with a freeware/shareware converter. You can embed a sound on a webpage with the <embed> tag, but again format is important. Your best bet is to embed a MIDI file or a Quicktime movie that is just an audio file. When you embed the sound it plays automatically. Here is a sample webpage I have done this on: http://www.wtvi.com/cavalry/defaultmusic.htm The tag I used for this was: <EMBED SRC="garyowen.mov" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.apple.com/quicktime" WIDTH=160 HEIGHT=16 CONTROLLER=true LOOP=true AUTOPLAY=true></P></CENTER> You can use ClarisHome page to insert a sound file of this type. Go to INSERT - QUICKTIME MOVIE and then select the options you want. I used Apple's Quicktime Pro (available for around $20) to convert this file, which was originally on a CD, into a quicktime movie that could be inserted into a webpage. The only problem with this is that the movie is very large and it may crash some computers without enough memory. That is why I made the page with background music an option for this website. The site owner obtained written permission to use that track from the CD on the website. This is ESSENTIAL if you use commercially produced CDs as sound files on your webpages. Q7: How do you get your webpage to automatically fit in a framed window, or to re-size itself? My boss uses the HISTORY attribute in Internet Explorer all the time, which takes up about a third of the screen, but would like our page to still fit in the remainder of the screen without having to scroll to see the rest of the page. Glad you found my website helpful! Your boss needs to understand that there are many factors which determine the display size of a webpage: - monitor size (15 in, 17 in, 19 in, 21 in) - selected monitor resolution (640x480, 800,x600, 1024x768, or larger) - size of browser window (some people size their browser window smaller than maximized size, some browse with history on as you boss does, etc) For these reasons, as a website designer you do NOT have any way of knowing exactly how big someone's browser window will be. You have two main alternatives: - design a site that will size itself automatically to different browser window sizes (like by using tables with percent sizes instead of pixel widths) - pick a size to design for and hope most people will be able to deal with that. The conservative way is to design for 640x480 screens. Some sites like CNN design for a specific size, and use tables as well as other more advanced layout techniques to do this. A simple way to contain your webpage within an area is to use tables with the border set to zero (so the borders are invisible) and define column widths by pixels. This will constrain the content within the tables to fit I the size area you want. Make sure you don't insert graphics that exceed that width, however, as the table will likely expand the size of the table. This behavior can be different in different browsers, so it is always a good idea to test in different browsers and on different platforms. Tools for the TEKS home | Article Archive | Technology Workshops Mailing List | Feedback | Tools and Techniques | Technology Idea Exchange Contact me using this webform. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.