Since I am pretty much going to be there with you in all classes until the end of the semester, I will not be holding my regular office hours as well these next few weeks. However, I am always available by appointment, so if you’d like to meet up to discuss the website project and/or your individual/group portion of it, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me and we’ll set something up. And, as always, e-mail with any questions/concerns. I’m happy to help in any way I can 🙂
Author Archives: Jill Belli
Inserting Footnotes into your Pages
Just a reminder that, using the WordPress FD Footnotes Plugin, you can now easily insert footnotes into your writing. To insert a footnote, after the text you want to cite, type the following:
An opening square bracket, the number of the footnote (it is the first one, put a 1, if it is the second footnote, put a 2, etc.), a period, a space, the text, and a closing square bracket.
Remember that we are using MLA style for citation. You can read more about MLA on the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) site.
New “Website Project” menu for individual pages
Just a quick note to say that, as you will see, I created a new menu item on the the site. When you hover over “Website Projects” (on the horizontal menubar under the header), you will get a dropdown menu with all of your individual commute pages (and the Gramercy Park page). Those of you who have not yet created pages, please do so ASAP (title them for right now with your name) and shoot me a quick e-mail to let me know to add it to this dropdown menu.
Great work today everyone! Looking forward to seeing the content you add on your pages over the next week. I will be available next week for office hours by appointment, so please don’t hesitate to schedule a time to come see me (or to just ask a quick question).
Tomorrow (W 4/18): Jill’s Office Hours + In-Class Work
Hi everyone. I hope you had a relaxing spring break and are enjoying this lovely weather! Just a quick note to say that I will be in class tomorrow afternoon to work with you on the website, so please do bring your laptops and questions, ideas, notes (etc.) with you to class.
Also, this week I will be holding my office hours (by appointment) tomorrow afternoon before class (I’ll need to leave right after class) instead of Thursday, so please shoot me a quick e-mail by tomorrow morning if you’d like to meet individually (or in groups) to discuss your work.
Don’t forget to register for the Tech Fair!
By now, you should have all registered for the upcoming Tech Fair.  Just in case you haven’t done so already, please make sure to register right away.  Also, click here to read a bit more about what to expect at Tech Fair.
New Baruch ITFs ePortfolio!
The lovely Baruch ITFs (there are five of us this year!) have started a Macaulay ITFs at Baruch ePortfolio. On this site, you can learn a bit about each of us, view all of our office hours, check out some cool “tips and tricks” for using ePortfolios, and even ask a question in our Discussion Forum.
Creating a Slideshow
One of our friendly Baruch ITFs, Emily, has created a great post detailing how to create slideshows out of your images using a plugin called NextGen.  Please click here to see the full post and learn how to create beautiful slideshows on our course site.
How to Upload Video Content to YouTube & Embed It on ePortfolios
First you need to upload video file to YouTube.
In order to upload video content to YouTube, you will have to sign in with either a YouTube or Google account. There is an “upload” button at the top right of the YouTube homepage (you can sign in from there too, or create an account). If you sign in with a Google account, you will then be instructed to created a YouTube account (or link your existing YouTube account – if you already have one – to your Google account). Once signed in, you can upload video by clicking “upload” and searching for files on you computer.
Once your video is uploaded to YouTube, you can simply copy the URL and paste it into a post/page you are creating on the ePortfolio. Â The video will then play directly in the post and will hardly take up any server space on the blog. Â Yup, it’s that simple!
Things to note:
It is preferable for you to embed your videos (rather than providing a link stating something like, “click here” for my video) so that they can be played directly in the post itself.  Linking to YouTube just adds an extra step for your viewers.  Remember that you can go back and edit your older post (in case you have linked there) and embed the vido just by copying/pasting the URL into the post.
If for some reason after you copy/paste the URL into the post you have having trouble getting your embedded video to display (ex: if you provided the link from YouTube but for some reason the video doesn’t appear within the post), try editing the post, switching to the HTML view (the tab on the top right of the post box) and then update the post.  This should fix the problem.
Backing up your files with “Time Machine”
I just want to remind everyone that if you have not backed up your Macbook Pro already, you really should (take it from me … I lost all of my data when my new Macbook unexpectedly crashed!  Backing up protects you in the case of a computer failure and/or if your laptop gets lost/stolen).  You can back-up on your Mac easily by using Time Machine.”
If you don’t have one already, you will need to purchase an external hard drive (look for a portable external hard drive).  Then you should plug it into your laptop and initiate “Time Machine” (you can do this by clicking on the round-arrow-clock-like symbol to the left of the wireless icon on the top menubar (not such a great description, I know!) or simply by opening “Time Machine” in your Applications.  Then it should guide you through the steps (it will probably have to re-format your external hard drive, so make sure you haven’t saved anything on there first).
the first back-up will take a long time (many hours!) because it copies everything on your machine. but after that it only takes a moment or two, because it only saves the changes that have been made since your last back-up. you can back up as frequently as you want simply by plugging in your external hard drive to your laptop.
Let me know if you have any problems with this (I’d be happy to go through this process with you during my office hours) … and please do back up so that you can keep all of your work, photos, music, videos (etc.) for as long as you want!
How to resize your photos for the Web/ePortfolios
Before you upload your images to our course site, you should make sure to resize them so that they don’t take up too much space on our course site/MHC web server.
No worries … it’s very simple to do this resizing!  Tsai-Shiou, another lovely ITF (from Queens College) has provided helpful instructions to guide you through the process.
You can even make your images smaller than what is suggested in the tutorial if you find they don’t look right within your blog posts/pages by inputting custom dimensions.  If you use the resizing option in Preview, and input one number, the other one will adjust automatically unless you tell it to do something else (the same is true for Gimp, another photo editing software that comes preloaded on your MHC Macs, and in many other apps).
Please make sure that you resize all images before uploading them to our site.
You may also want to crop your photos before resizing/uploading them in order to highlight specific parts of them.  Cropping is easiest in Preview–use the select tool, then crop (command-K), then resize as per Tsai-Shiou’s awesome tutorial.
