Intermediate Internet ClassAdditional Materials

For my Intermediate Internet class, there are a few online resources to which I would like to direct you...

Online Shopping
eBay 101: Beginners Guide to eBay Buying and Selling - This is a series of 'lessons' on using eBay.

Other popular online stores include:
Amazon
Overstock.com
Pricegrabber Comparison Shopping

Travel
Kiplinger's 28 Best Travel Sites - Suggested websites that help you to schedule/book/purchase travel arrangements and accommodations.

ConsumerSearch has reviews of their Top Five Travel Sites

If you are a member of AAA, visit their website for travel plans, maps, and more

Some of the popular travel sites include:
Travelocity
Kayak
Priceline
TravelWorm - Specializes in Las Vegas, Laughlin Nevada hotels


Libraries
Orem Public Library
Provo City Library at Academy Square
Pioneer - Utah's Online Library

Museums
The Louvre in Paris
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
Guggenheim Museum
Smithsonium Museums


Reference Resources
Dictionary.com is your onlne dictionary, always at your figertips
Thesaurus.com is their sister site, helping you to find the right word
Reference.com is another sibling, offering an online Encyclopedia
Encyclopedia Brittanica has an online version available
Encyclopedia.com offers yet another online encyclopedia
Wikipedia is an online collaborative encyclopedia. Anyone can add to, correct, or enhance the contents of this popular resource.

Maps
There are three popular online map services:
Mapquest
Bing Maps (formerly known as Mapblast)
Google Maps

Other Cool Sites
Google Earth
YouTube
Kids in Mind - Detailed Movie Ratings

Facebook & Twitter Class-Additional Helps

Facebook
The big question is: what is the difference between the News Feed and the Live Feed. Find one explanation here. The 'official' answer from Facebook can be found here.

Facebook and Twitter
Find out about linking Facebook to Twitter here.
Some additional information can be found here and here.

Park City Board of REALTORS - Blogging Class

Here are some links and details to supplement our classroom discussion.

Blog Hosting Providers
http://www.typepad.com - Free 14-day trial
http://www.blogharbor.com - Free 30-day trial
http://www.blogger.com - Free

Use a Blog Script on Your Own Website
http://www.wordpress.org
http://b2evolution.net/

Blog Design:
45 Excellent Blog Designs, posted August 28th, 2007
30 More Excellent Blog Designs, posted November 22nd, 2007
45 More Excellent Blog Designs, posted February 20th, 2008

Some other sites that may be helpful:
A Directory of Real Estate Blogs

Have a Question? Need some more help? Post a comment!

PSE2 Final Session Materials

Here are the handouts and photos that we went through during the final session of class.

I hope you found them to be helpful.

Create a Photo Collage handout in PDF format.

Remove Glare from Glasses handout in PDF format.

Here are the images for the second handout:

• overall glare


• reflective glare


• flash glare

Park City Board of REALTORS - Web Design I Class

Here are some links and details to supplement our classroom discussion.

Hosted Blogs:
Blogger (Blogspot)

Blog Scripts to run from your own website:
WordPress (free)
Movable Type (free and paid versions available)

Twitter:
Definition on Wikipedia.com
Twitter web page

Bad website design examples:
The Top 5% of all web sites that gave our judges a permanent headache award
The "World's Worst Website"

Other example:
Top 10 Crazy Celebrity Websites With Good/Bad Design Elements

Color Schemes:
Color Scheme Designer
Color Combos
Adobe Kuler

Newsletters:
Campaign Monitor

Podcasts:
Wikipedia's Definition of podcast
Podcast Alley - "The Place to Find Podcasts"
Apple-iTunes Podcasts page

Menus and More:
Dynamic Drive - Scripts, menus, and lots more, including menu and navigation scripts

Web Design Workshop Helps

Explaining CSS Positioning in Greater Detail
Visit http://css.researchkitchen.de/classpage/explaining-css-positioning.html


CSS Layout
Visit http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/stylesheets/csslayout.html


W3 Schools CSS Positioning
Visit http://www.w3schools.com/CSS/css_positioning.asp


Learn CSS Positioning in Ten Steps
Visit http://www.barelyfitz.com/screencast/html-training/css/positioning/


Convert a Website to CSS
Visit http://www.digital-web.com/articles/converting_a_page_to_css/


A Real World CSS Conversion
Visit http://accessat.c-net.us/articles/convert.html


Software to do it for you
...is available here for about $100.

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Separating Style from Content

Visit http://accessat.c-net.us/articles/css.html

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CSS for All Browsers

Visit http://accessat.c-net.us/articles/hide-css_p1.html

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Best CSS Tools
Visit http://techmagazine.ws/best-css-tools/


BOOK: HTML CSS Visual Quickstart

And accompanying website

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TomaWeb Image Mapper Freeware Program

Download it here.

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Online Image Optimizer Utility
Can be found here.

Photoshop Elements Intermediate class helps

Helps applicable to most version of PSE

Find out how to embed your tags with the photos themselves.

Limitiations on file size in editor and organizer explained--and a way to overcome those limits detailed.

An Animated Introduction to Photoshop Elements.

Photoshop Elements 6 Helps

An article about the changes in Photoshop Elements 6.

Adobe User Forum - Information about File size too large error.

There is a page listing some undocumented features of PSE 6.

PowerPoint 2007 Helps

In my PowerPoint 2007: Beginning class, we discovered several things that are different from previous versions. Here are some great helps for those discoveries, as well as some other handy helps.

Summary Slide
My favorite quick slide making tool, the Summary Slide generator is gone. But as I had suspected, someone has come up with a macro to simulate it!
Visit the blog of Fabio Scagliola to see his macro.

Convert PowerPoint to a DVD Video or a Video File
People love creating business presentations as well a dynamic photo scrapbooks in PowerPoint because of the flexible and powerful text, graphic, transition, and animation tools. But PowerPoint does not have the built-in capabilities to put your presentations onto a DVD Video for the TV or to convert them to a video file format. There are, however, third-party programs that can do such things.
Wondershare is a company that sells software to burn your PowerPoint presentation directly to a DVD Video, as well as to convert it to popular Video File formats. At last check, they were offering a fully-functional 30-day trial of each of those programs -- so visit their site to find out more.

What's Different in PowerPoint 2007?
This blog, hosted by/part of (??) Wondershare, has a list of changes in PowerPoint 2007.

Photoshop Elements Intermediate Resources

Magic Extractor
Printable tutorials:

http://photography.consumerelectronicsnet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=36439/
http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_magicextractor.html

Video tutorials:
http://video.about.com/graphicssoft/Magic-Extractor-in-PS-Element.htm

http://www.bmyers.com/public/1254.cfm?sd=30

Sepia Tone
http://www.graphic-design.com/Photoshop/Seminars/sepia_sepiatone/index.html

http://www.easyelements.com/photoshop-sepia-tone.html

http://www.myjanee.com/tuts/sepia/sepia.htm

Selective Colorization

http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/pselements/ss/partialcolor.htm

http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_partialcolor.html

Video Tutorial:

http://video.about.com/graphicssoft/Partial-BW-Images-in-Elements.htm

Hand Tinting/Coloring a Black and White Photo

http://www.bycorene.com/class/elements_tut2.htm

http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_colorize.html

Filters

http://www.arraich.com/elements/pse_ooutline1.htm

http://www.kent.k12.wa.us/KSD/IT/wwwdev/photoshop/filters/index.html

http://faculty.deanza.edu/donahuemary/stories/storyReader$2275

- Fixing Blemishes with filters:

http://www.techlearning.com/quickflicks/showArticle.php?articleID=164901555

Healing Brush

(and clone) http://www.macworld.com/2004/11/secrets/jandigitalhubextra/index.php

Color Fade

http://www.graphicreporter.com/tutorials/elements_fadingcolor.html

Stock Photos

http://www.bigfoto.com/

http://www.fontplay.com/freephotos/

http://www.imageafter.com/

http://www.freerangestock.com/

http://www.morguefile.com/

Web Design Workshop, Session 2

Here are links to items we covered in our workshop...

Scrolling text within a DIV is discussed here and the example we saw in class is here. This one is done with Javascript and without a scrollbar -- just point to the up or down button to scroll!

Take a look at Firebug, an add-on for Firefox that lets you examine your code and statistics.

Browser Display Statistics and Browser Statistics

Here is some general information about CSS. Information about writing CSS for the different browsers and the hiccups you may encounter can be found here and here.

Fixing problems with CSS and Browsers in Dreamweaver.

Info on Javascript and scripts you can download can be found here and here. Another cool one here.

Using international characters info can be found here.

Finally, for Kelly, here is the link to the web page with the colors you had found. Once you open the page, clcik on View, Source, then you can save the file to your hard drive.

Web Page Workshop - Class Material

For my Web Design Workshop, I have a few links to resources and reference material.

Class Discussions

META Builder 2 - The site we visited that will generate META Tags for you

One tutorial for making animated GIFs using Photoshop/ImageReady

Another tutorial for making animated GIFs using Photoshop/ImageReady

The 'official' tutorial from Adobe about making animated GIFs using Photoshop/ImageReady

Some resources for Color Schemes are available here and here and the one we saw in class is here.

Here is the link to the CSS Zen Garden.

StyleSpread is the CSS editor I had mentioned that is available for half price, and edits your style sheet in real time.

Here is that article about the web designer creating a web page using tables then CSS.

And here is another article about laying out your web page using CSS instead of tables.

Here is yet another article about changing your web page layout to CSS from tables.

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Other Resources

Also, here are links to all the resources from handout 1, plus a couple more:

GENERAL WEB DESIGN

• http://www.boutell.com/


• http://www.webappers.com/


• http://www.sitepoint.com/


• http://webdesign.about.com/


• http://www.onlyforwebmaster.com/


• http://www.w3schools.com/

HTML (HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE)

• http://htmlhelp.com/


• http://www.htmlgoodies.com/


• http://www.lissaexplains.com/


• http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/


• http://www.annabella.net/html.html


• http://www.computerhope.com/learnhtm.htm

CSS (CASCADING STYLE SHEETS)

• http://htmlhelp.com/reference/css/


• http://artypapers.com/csshelppile/


• http://www.neopets.com/~csshelp


• http://www.w3schools.com/css/


• Web Design Group Guide to Cascading Style Sheets


• W3C Style Sheet Guide

PHP (PHP HYPERTEXT PREPROCESSOR)

• http://www.handyphp.com/


• http://php.resourceindex.com/


• http://www.phpfreaks.com/


• http://www.phphelp.com/


• http://www.w3schools.com/php/default.asp

META Tags

• Energysearch


• META Builder 2 - A site that will generate META Tags for you


• Web Developer's Virtual Library

FRAMES

• Sharky's Netscape Frames Tutorial


• Framing the Web

FTP Utilities

• Using FTP


• Transferring Files Using FTP - Material to accompany the book, "Internet and Web Essentials"


• Books-Internet introductions & guides - Using FTP

Search Engines and Site Promotion

• searchengines.com - your complete Search Engine resource center


• Promoting Your Pages from Oregon State University


• VirtualPromote

Cascading Style Sheets

• Web Design Group Guide to Cascading Style Sheets


• W3C Style Sheet Guide

Add Text to a Slide in PowerPoint

On the Drawing Toolbar, click the Text Box button.
Drag to create a large box on the slide.
Type in the text.
Select the text (click-and-drag [or Ctrl+a]).
Format the font, font size, font color, as desired.
You can drag the handles of the text box to resize it; the text will wrap like in a word processor.
You can use Custom Animation to animate the text box.

Excel Basics class files

For the students of my Computer Boot Camp: Excel Beginning class that uses my Excel Basics book, here is a zip file containing the files used in class. This is for those that do not have a floppy drive on their computers at home.

http://computertutorpaul.com/resource/excelbasicsfiles.zip

Cool Web Sites

In my "Make the Most of the Internet" class, we had a first. My wife not only attended one of my classes, but she helped to teach it!

Since my wife is so Internet savvy, I asked her to show the class some of the cool things she does online. The following links are to the web sites she showed during class... plus some that we did not have time to get to.

I encourage you to post a comment with any really cool web sites that you come across that you think others would enjoy, as well.

News
http://www.ksl.com/
http://deseretnews.com/dn
http://www.cnn.com/
http://www.espn.com/
http://www.foxnews.com


Government
http://utah.gov/
http://www.irs.gov/
http://www.cr.ex.state.ut.us/


Information
http://www.pollen.com/
http://www.psoriasis.org


Murray Utah Public Library
http://www.murray.lib.ut.us/


Shopping
http://www.ebay.com/
http://www.waltonfeed.com/ - Emergency Preparedness
http://www.orientaltrading.com/
http://www.publicsurplus.com/
http://www.farmorsbutik.com/ - Scandinavian Gifts and Collectibles
http://www.freespace.net/~marpin/supply.htm - Sewing Patterns, Supplies & Notions
http://www.hutchal.clara.net/curtains/accessoriesindex.htm - Draperies/Curtains
http://www.taunton.com/threads/index.asp -Sewing magazine website
http://www.lindaleeoriginals.com/ - Home of The Happy Serger
http://www.wildginger.com/ - Sewing: Alter Patterns
http://www.appliance411.com/service/ - Appliance Information


Search Engines and More
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://www.google.com/

The Long Hair Community
http://forums.longhaircommunity.com/

Recipes
http://www.campbellsoup.com
http://www.copykat.com/

Budget Stretching
http://www.stretcher.com

Other
http://www.dialabc.com/ - Translate your phone number to text


This list may be updated occasionally. Check back for more links.

OpenOffice.org Helps

For those that are considering or have made the switch to OpenOffice.org 2.0, here are some links to web pages containing material that will help you in adapting to the new interface. Some linked websites may require the creation of an account and/or logging in to view the content.


Articles and Tutorials
Paving the way for OpenOffice
...Now's the Time to Consider OpenOffice.org
Examine Open Office's interoperability with Microsoft Office
Smart formatting for better compatibility between Office Suites
OpenOffice Base: Converting data and files from Access


Official OpenOffice Resources
Home Page
Download Central
OpenOffice User Guide (PDF, 7.6 MB)
OpenOffice Migration Guide (for MS Office Users) (PDF, 2.3 MB)


Other Resources
OpenOffice.org Portable (Install your suite on a flash drive to use anywhere)
OpenOffice.org 2.0.4, Novell Edition

Microsoft Office 2007 Helps

For those that are considering or have made the switch to Microsoft Office 2007, here are some links to web pages containing material that will help you in adapting to the new interface.

Take the Test Drive
If you are not sure you are ready for the switch, you can actually try out the new Office 2007 programs before purchasing or installing the upgrade. The 2007 Microsoft Office Test Drive feature is available via the Internet, and gives you a virtual feel for working with the new interface (you'll need to download and install the Citrix browser plugin if you don't already have it, and you will need a Windows Live ID --the process to install and create these will be automatic).

Keyboard shortcuts in the 2007 Office system
- Quick Reference Card

Printable Keyboard Shortcuts for each of the Office Programs
- Keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Office Word 2007
- Excel 2007 shortcut and function keys
- Keyboard shortcuts for PowerPoint 2007
- Keyboard shortcuts for Outlook 2007
- Keyboard shortcuts for Access 2007

Find your Favorite Features in Office 2007
I think that this is one feature worthy of those "Wow!" ads Microsoft is plastering about. The Interactive Command Reference Guide lets you go into a virtual Office 2003 program window and then when you go to perform a command, it tells you how to access that command in the new 2007 version of the program. Very cool! Check it out (you'll need Adobe Flash Player 7.0 or later).
- Interactive: Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide
- Interactive: Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide
- Interactive: PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide
- Interactive: Outlook 2003 to Outlook 2007 command reference guide

Office Compatibility Pack
You can download the Office Compatibility Pack (27.1 MB) from Microsoft. This is for users of Microsoft Office versions 2003 and XP, and will allow you to open and edit documents made with the new Office 2007 programs. Be sure that you have downloaded and installed all the critical updates for Windows/Office before installing this item.

Save as PDF Add-in
You can download the 2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS (934 KB) from Microsoft. This gives you the ability to save your Office 2007 documents in PDF (Portable Document Format) or XPS (XML Paper Specification) format.

What's Missing?
If you want to see what was removed from Word 2007, check out this page from Microsoft.

To "delete your trail" when checking mail on a public computer...

1. Log Off or Sign out of your e-mail account.
2. If you are using Internet Explorer, go to the toolbar, and click on Tools, then Internet Options.
3. Click on Delete Cookies, then click on OK.
4. Click on Delete Files, then check the box (Delete all offline content), and click OK.
5. Then click on Clear History.
6. Click OK.

To Record Narration in PowerPoint

The following instructions were originally typed up by a
student, Janelle, during our PowerPoint class. I have gone back and made edits to enhance the instructions.

From the Menu Bar, go to Slide Show. Click Record Narration.

Be sure that you have a microphone plugged into the computer before proceeding.

Click button that says Set Microphone Level. Talk normally. The record level will be adjusted automatically so that the red area does not show up. Once it has adjusted, click OK.

Back in the Record Narration dialog box, click OK to start recording the narration.

If you had selected a slide other than the first slide when you began recording the narration, a dialog box will ask if you want to start recording from the current slide or from the first slide. Click first slide to start at beginning.

Start talking and say what you want to say on each slide. Advance through the slide show like normal when you want to go to the next slide or bullet point. Then to continue to talk on each slide.

When you finish the slide show, a dialog box will say Narrations have been saved from each slide. Click Yes and it will save the new timings; any previous slide timings will be overridden.

View your slide show to enjoy the show complete with your narrations.

Microsoft Office Dictionary Tools

In my PowerPoint class, we discussed the custom dictionary in Microsoft Office and the issue with an error message stating that the custom dictionary is full. We found the answers to dealing with this situation at

http://helpdesk.wisc.edu/page.php?id=2314

Here's to more dictionary entries!

My Very First Blog Post

I had heard about Blogs, but never paid much attention to what all the fuss was about. Now, here I am creating my very own Blog for the first time. Wow! Goosebumps! Aren't you impressed?

I am actually creating this Blog and its first post during one of my classes to show the students just how fast and easy it is to create a Blog. You see, students? Fast and easy!

"Yes, teacher. Yes, teacher," one student just said. "Watch what you say!"

So how is that for a Blog entry?

"Fabulous!"