Unimaginative Title for POTCERT Week-6 Post

I had relegated Hyper Text Markup Language
to the same dusty corner where my “DOS for Dummies” lay forgotten and irrelevant.  Why bother creating a web page the hard way?  I have WYSIWYG† authoring options ranging from Nightmare (MS Word) to Dreamweaver.

Then I started using WordPress and Moodle.  Formatting buttons are kind of limited there, but Hey, there’s an HTML tab where I could enter code to do more imaginative stuff, if I could remember the tags.  And it’s so nice of WP to allow a bit of formatting in comments too.  So I dusted off the old tome (figuratively speaking – literal translation=I Googled it) and found W3 School and HTML Code Tutorial – the two resources I raid when I want almost anything beyond the basic bold, underline, and italics tags.  I still can’t remember where the quotes go in img src= nor the syntax for span which replaces the font tag in version 5, but I don’t have to.  Sure, if I use them frequently enough I’ll remember; but just knowing that I can find the code goes a long way.  And understanding what it’s supposed to do allows me to play with the parameters when I copy and paste snippets I’m too lazy to type.

I usually paste the embed codes from YouTube or Vimeo into the HTML view, but I’ll try just pasting the URL into Visual view without creating a link as per the edublogs video.

Well, how about that?  Sure enough, it works!  Something new and easier.
This video from an earlier language class has a dual-purpose, hard and soft.  One can learn the names of the ten objects on the table, but it also demonstrates a learning procedure which can be adapted beyond just identifying nouns.

Now about RSS – It’s dead easy to subscribe to a tag or blog with Google Reader – “Really Simple Syndication” is an accurate name.  My problem is, when am I going to find time to read all the posts that get harvested?  My best intentions are forgotten in the flood of new stuff from the firehose.  My DS106 subscription alone has over a thousand unread posts.  Even POTCERT Subscribed a few weeks ago, shows 142 (now 139 because I got sidetracked looking at it).  Ignoring my RSS subscriptions is a choice I make, just like ignoring most of my Facebook notifications and email lists.

† WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzy-wig”) stands for “What You See Is What You Get”, just another example of  disgustingly cute acronyms for unimaginative computer-speak.  It’s even in spell-check for goodness sake!  More examples of this pocket-protector vocabulary are TWAIN for Thing Without An Interesting Name,  SCSI (pronounced “scuzzy”) for the now thankfully obsolete Small Computer Serial Interface, and GUI (pronounced “gooey”) for Graphic User Interface.  Masquerading as jargon, these unsavoury characters get away with sounding acceptable when they should be marched out and shot along with all the nouns like interface, mouse, key, blog, surf, etc. that have the chutzpa to aspire to action verbs.