Damacy

In everyday conversation, you are expected to have some knowledge of popular culture; a person may reference Angelina Jolie, the Sears Tower, or the “Priceless”  MasterCard ads and you would be expected to understand what those are.

For our purposes today, memes are pieces of culture that have caught on (for the most part) exclusively on the Internet. If you are managing a community, it can be important to recognize and their significance.

Post a meme that no one else has mentioned in comments. If you need help, try Know Your Meme.

Post something interesting to comments if you like.

Or read about how the nuts and bolts of an https connection.

Beginner

Understand the difference between Agile and Waterfall development methodologies.

Intermediate

Read about how Scrum can provide some structure for an agile approach.

Introduction to the Scrum Process (no knowledge of this particular company, but they wrote a decent article)

Advanced

Defend waterfall. Take the position that it is the superior methodology. If this comes naturally to you, do the reverse.

Beginner

Use PHPMyAdmin for now, but take note of what commands are being generated.

Create a database called “bookstore”.

Create a table called “books” with the following columns: “id” (integer, auto-increment, primary key), “title” (varchar), and “price” (decimal 8,2).

Add a few books. Note how the id automatically goes up. 

Read about Float vs. Decimal at The Many Benefits of Money…Data Type!. Note this deals with Microsoft SQL Server. Some of the details are not relevant, but the general concept is worth understanding.

You’ll notice that PHPMyAdmin uses a lot of `backtics`. This is only necessary when the name of a table or column is the same as a MySQL command.

Intermediate

Do the above, but use the command line.

Advanced

Do the above using the command line, and add support for multiple authors. Place a database constraint on the number of authors for each book (maximum of three authors, etc).

Unrelated: How to be happy in business

Beginner

Google's main sprite image.

Sprites (in this context) are an alternative to image slicing. One big image file instead of many small ones. Fewer connections can mean faster download, especially for broadband users.

CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them

Optional:

A List Apart: CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death

CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time

Intermediate

Check out SilkSprite: A CSS Sprite Plugin for Blueprint.

If you use FamFamFam icons in a site of yours, consider switching to a sprite approach. Write your thoughts about the transition in comments.

Advanced

Transition an existing site of yours to a css sprite approach, post the pros and cons to comments (number of requests, image sizes, etc). If you do not have a fitting site, try to find a site that would benefit from sprites.

Domain names hold the internet together.

Beginner

Computers connect to other computers on the Internet using IP addresses (ex: 208.113.233.147). People (generally) use domain names (ex: example.com, google.com), which are easier to remember. The domain name system translates domain names into ip addresses.

Domain names are controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), who delegates top level domains (.com, .edu, etc) to a variety of domain registrars, some government-run, some by private companies.

Different domains have different policies. Anyone can lease a .com domain name, while the organizations ICANN appointed to govern .edu, .coop, and others have specific criteria that must be met before they will accept a registration.

If the registration lapses on a domain name, it is released and someone else can buy it. At this point it is possible you will never be able to use that domain name again. Generally, if you continue to renew a domain name’s registration, you can maintain control of it indefinitely. 

Intermediate

Mike Davidson: How to Snatch an Expiring Domain

Advanced

Learn how to become a .com registrar. Involves becoming an ICANN accredited registrar then going through Verisign’s financial and technical certification.

Beginners

Read up on the Rule of Thirds. Most the time the rule of thirds is described in terms of photography (Explanation one, Explantion two). The rule of thirds is also useful for design in general: Presentation Zen: The power of the visual: Learning from Down Under promotion videos.

Everyone

Think about the rule of thirds, then illustrate your understanding by posting a photo to the comments. No photos from before reading this.

Laws vary from country to country. You should be conscious of laws in you and/or your business’s country as well as the countries where your service providers are located. For example, if you are Canadian resident who owns a U.S. corporation which is hosted in the U.K., a violation of Canadian, U.S., or U.K. law might result in your website being taken offline or you suffering other penalties.

As a convenience, at this site we focus on U.S. law, as many service providers (PayPal, Amazon, Google) are headquartered in the U.S. and bound by those laws. Understanding the laws of other countries is a valuable exercise even for fairly grounded U.S. professionals, we will attempt to provide coverage there in the future.

Our lessons are not written by lawyers and are not considered to be a substitute for legal advice. Additionally, these are very short descriptions of complex topics, they naturally lack depth.

Beginner

Web publishing often intersects with copyright and trademark law.

Copyright says that content you create (anything: text, images, videos, css, html) cannot be used by someone else without permission. Copyright is automatic, it isn’t necessary to file for it or place a notice on a site for content to be protected by it. An exception to copyright is “fair use”, which allows you to use small excerpts from copyrighted material without the need to request permission.

Sometimes publishers will offer an automatic license to use their content which may nullify some of the copyright limitations. Creative Commons licenses are one example but there are many others. In code, you may often run into BSD (free to use, just keep attribution in code) and GNU (Free to use, keep attribution and publish any improvements).

Trademark was created so that consumers would be able to clearly distinguish who made a product (so when you buy a Coke, you are buying a Coke, not a generic knock-off). You can refer to third party trademarks as long as users won’t be confused into thinking that you are that trademarked entity. Use as little of a trademark as possible, don’t use the logo if the name of the company will suffice. With permission of the trademark holder, you can use trademarks in any way agreed upon.

This was an incredibly terse overview. Research any aspect that you think will specifically pertain to your business.

Intermediate

What do you do when a site is inappropriately using your copyrighted content? What happens when you are accused of a copyright violation? The answer to both is likely a DMCA Takedown notice. Read the Chilling Effects FAQ about DMCA Safe Harbor.

Advanced

In the comments, list cases from the last two years that have altered or shaped copyright or trademark law.

Beginner

Intro to web statistics for site that aren’t yours! There are several ways to discover the traffic of a website.

Site reported statistics depend upon the goodwill of site owner, but can be the most accurate and certainly the most detailed (how many registered users, total megabyte of images uploaded, etc).

User research performed by Nielsen, academic institutions, or others. Alexa provides estimates of traffic: it can be inaccurate, but somewhat improved around 2007 and are potentially valuable for quick comparisons. Quantcast and Compete also offer web statistics.

Using results from several of these sources can improve your confidence in how a website is doing.

Intermediate + Advanced

Post a site usage comparison to comments and detail your source. For example: 

MySpace’s unique visitors have fallen slightly since early 2008 while Facebook’s have gone up ~10 million every month since November 2008, passing MySpace in December 2008 and presently having nearly double the uniques. Via http://siteanalytics.compete.com/facebook.com+myspace.com/

Try to find something surprising or interesting.

Advanced people, dig deeper than the stats sites by including some insight collected from other sources: site reported stats, Nielsen reports, etc.

Beginner

Read about grid design.
Designing With Grid-Based Approach

A number of good links there, but Grids are Good (an 8MB pdf of slides by Khoi Vinh) is particularly recommended.

Intermediate

Try several CSS grid frameworks. Blueprint, 960 Grid System, Yahoo! UI Library: Grids CSS. Post which you prefer to comments.

Advanced

Create an attractive page that uses more than 6 columns and text that aligns on a baseline grid.