For those of you who are interested in learning more about code (beyond what this course requires), check out Code Academy which takes you through tutorials, exercises and quizzes on HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3, PHP, Javascript and more.  It’s great to do just a couple of these at a basic level, to gain a better understanding of what’s going on ‘behind the scenes’, help you troubleshoot issues and perhaps broaden your scope of what online writing allows you to do.

If you’re feeling really nerdy, you can take this a step further and check out Lynda.com for tutorials on PHP, Javascript and more.  You can set up a profile using your RMIT email, follow the steps here.

Lynda is an excellent resource that you have access to as part of your enrolment at RMIT.  It features entire courses, so while this would be a lot of extra work, it could be a great challenge to set yourself for Netmed – learn to code and try to make something with your new found skills.

As I’ve mentioned, we’re putting some effort into working with 2 different blogging platforms – the Mediafactory (MF) blogs for Media students, and the free WordPress (WP) blogs for everyone else.

If you have a free WP account and want to use the same dashboard as the MF, here’s a quick little hack: once logged into your blog, type in your blog home page address (should be there already) then add the following: /wp-admin .  So the URL in your browser bar should look like this:

with your blog name in place of netmed2016testblog, obvs.  This will take you to the same dashboard as the MF blogs, and while there are a lot more options, it’s all there in front of you.  A few students had trouble adding links, so if you want to do that, check out WP support here.

I would recommend this way of doing things, so we all have a common experience.  However, if that all sounds like too much, read on…

Continue reading Free WordPress blog accounts: Dashboard, pages, categories & links →

A succinct little clip that explains what RSS is, and how to use it.  If you’d like a way to organise and present your resources in an easy to manage fashion, this will be good for you – but you’ll need to put a bit of work in to let it sink in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn1QXC0Yevc

(source: http://www.staynalive.com/2011/05/twitter-and-facebook-both-quietly-kill.html)