“The blog world has become accustomed to the participation of those for whom anonymity provides courage, that is those who find the blog an instrument of vituperation, anger, and bitter ad hominem revenge on the world. No one has yet devised a proper method of shunting anger into a more productive project. For those who are bitter, we must have sympathy but no respect.”

Find it on the left side of his homepage.

Today, she’s livetweeting the murder trial of Kevin McGregor, and one of my favorite topics — online comments — came up.

It’s great stuff, and the full feed is a wonderful example of courts coverage that reminded me of Steve Buttry’s (lengthy) guide to digital-first reporting. Here, too, is another example of live court reporting with Steve’s commentary — and another post with a sample court reporter’s workflow.

Here are a few samples from Erica’s feed today:

Quickly create custom CSS with web-friendly type with csstypeset.com.

I’m a big believer in learning by doing. But I’m also a believer in deadlines, so sometimes you don’t have time to learn. Well, here’s a pretty cool tool that strikes a balance:

csstypeset.com

Use a very user-friendly control panel with sliders to get the type effects you desire, copy the code and slap it into your stylesheet and you’re off and running. It requires a basic understanding of CSS — and if you want, you can watch as the code changes to learn more as you go.

Very
nice!

Code Year achievements

I recently fired off an email to my staff announcing some CSS (very simple stuff – a drop cap, a few types of subheads, a shiny new pullquote) I wrote to create a few new styles for our website. In doing so, I wrote a brief explanation of CSS.

I love doing that stuff and I think that to be an interesting journalist right now you have to be a little curious about code of all kinds. That’s why I’ve been really excited about Code Year, which is a year’s worth of free code tutorials from Codecademy. They’ve started it off with JavaScript, which I’d taken a crack at learning a little while ago. The Codecademy approach is really fun and I highly recommend it.

It is free, after all, and it’ll tickle the Foursquare part of your brain, if you need additional motivation.

Got other favorite methods of learning such things? I’m also a fan of w3schools.com — though that’s got substantially less hand-holding and is better for folks who are great at motivating themselves. That was my original resource for JavaScript (along with Eloquent JavaScript, which sort of reads like JavaScript for English majors and is available on your Kindle) and continues to be a nice resource for CSS and plenty of other things.

Ready to put in the work? | Photo: Flickr user pasukaru76

Get your domain

This is the step everybody always wants to skip to. No, no, I wouldn’t worry about knowing what you’ll put on your website or how you’ll do it — of course not! Just get the name and worry about the rest later.

Well, fine. Here we are. Use your byline for your domain name unless that’s unavailable. Pick a host. Here’s why I recommend DreamHost.

I do think that every working journalist should understand how HTML works and know, by memory, the most basic tags. So here’s the quickest description I can give you. If you already understand how HTML works, skip on down to the links I provide to site-building guides.

How HTML works

If you’re updating your organization’s website, you’re probably using a content management system (CMS) that allows you to edit in two different ways. One way is very much like editing a Word document, with a little button that bolds text for you and a little button that italicizes it and so on. This is called a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. The other way is straight HTML and it probably shows up with a bunch of <p> and <br> and <a href=”yaketyyak”>don’ttalkback</a> type of stuff, right?

Understanding HTML is like knowing how to read blueprints. | Photo: Flickr user pasukaru76

The key to a more zenlike experience with your content management system is to be able to switch out of your WYSIWYG editor and into your HTML editor and be comfortable there.

Most HTML tags work in pairs. One is an “open” tag and the other one is a “close” tag.

Bold and italic

The simplest example I can give is how to bold some text. So here we go. The tag for bold is <strong>. So to bold some text, I’d type one <strong> tag, then the text I want to bold, and then </strong> tag. Note the “/” in the closing tag. That’s what tells your browser that bold time is over.

So: <strong>Alec Guinness</strong> would give you this: Alec Guinness.

The same goes for the italics tags, which are <em> and </em>.

So: <em>Obi-Wan</em> would give you this: Obi-Wan.

Links

The next such pair you should get to know are <a> and </a>. With these, you can make a link. They’re a little different from the <strong> and </strong> combo because you have to give them a little more information — like tell them not only which text should be a link, but where that link should send someone.

There are a lot of tags like this, so pay attention:

<a href=”http://google.com”>A well known search engine</a>. = A well known search engine

<a href=”http://google.com”> is the first part. Here, you have opened your tag and told the link where to point. That “href” business? It’s old-time geekspeak for “where d’you wanna go?” So you just put in the web address (URL, which some people actually pronounce “Earl” — I swear I have heard this, but I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re feeling really cocksure) right after “href=”

In this case, you can see that I have told the link to point to “http://google.com” and then I have closed the first tag with a >.

Next, I have written the words that I would like to be linked to Google. In this case, “A well known search engine” are those words. You’ll notice that now it’s kinda acting like the bold and italics tags — the stuff in the middle does what the stuff in the tags tell it to do. And then, of course, I have closed the link with the </a> tag.

So now you understand the most basic tags and how they work. This will take you a long way in figuring out how to do other things and, importantly, how to fix a page when something is broken. Very commonly, errors are caused by not closing a tag. For example if you were to start to build a link but not close it with the </a> tag, all of the text in the rest of your document would be linked. You’d look at your code and see that you forgot a </a> and you’d throw it in there, pat yourself on the back  and open a beer, wouldn’t you?

Yes. You would.

Got some time? Need more knowledge?

I don’t plan to write a whole book on HTML, but I can certainly direct you to a trusted source that put together five tutorials on building a website.

• How to Make a Web Site Part I: Understanding and Writing HTML
• How to Make a Web Site Part II: Styling and CSS
• How to Make a Web Site Part III: A Site from Start to Finish
• How to Make a Web Site Part IV: Choosing a Host and Launching Your Site
• How to Make a Web Site Part V: Additional Resources

Theme it: What kind of site are you building?

Is this a blog? A portfolio site? A landing page?

For all of these, I recommend WordPress. Here’s why: It’s free, there’s documentation for it all over the web, it’s massively customizable, easy to understand and once you know how to use it, you can put it on your resume, where it’ll mean something.

You could also use Tumblr. It’s also free, there’s a built-in social aspect to it and if your needs are relatively simple, I find it’s easier to make Tumblr look really clean and sharp and stay that way than it is with WordPress.

For now, I will assume you’ve picked WordPress.

WordPress is delightfully scalable. You'll thank yourself later. | Photo: Flickr user pasukaru76

Install it on your site — hopefully with a one-click install. How do you know if you can use a one-click install? That depends on your web host. If you don’t know, call your web host’s customer service line and ask if they offer a one-click or other easy install of WordPress and how to find it. If they don’t offer that, you’re about to learn more about the web and FTP than you probably wanted to, but extra homework just means extra knowledge. You can do it: WordPress Codex: Installing WordPress.

Once it’s set up, you’ll want to shop for a WordPress theme that fits your needs. For example, I’d use this for a landing page-style site, perhaps one of these for a visual portfolio and this is the one I use for the blog you’re looking at right now.

Some useful resources:

• WordPress: Adding new themes
• WordPress Lessons
• WordPress: Creating posts
• WordPress: Creating pages
• WordPress: Using plugins

If you can’t find what you need, just Google it. I promise it’s out there.

You’re gonna need some images

As you’ve seen on my site, I lean on Creative Commons-licensed photos from Flickr. But I also shoot photos with my Android phone and want to include them from time to time. I’m a big believer in paying for intellectual property — what a sucker, right? — so the last copy I’ve got of Photoshop is on a laptop that I don’t use much. When I want to bang out some simple images — maybe crop or resize something, touch up the colors — I’ll use one of two free web services.

Both of these allow you to edit images right in the browser window.

Pixlr has a feel kind of like a really old version of Photoshop, complete with filters and a few other things. If you’re an old-line Photoshop user, go here to edit your images.

Picnik is a lot simpler for folks who aren’t familiar with Photoshop and have simple needs.

You’re gonna need some content

You’re on your own. Good luck.

But here’s the thing: Nobody would have had to deal with that if they just never used GoDaddy in the first place.

I like to think of GoDaddy as a little blister package found in a supermarket register display case with colorful lettering that says “MY FIRST DOMAIN,” maybe with the ‘N’ turned backward to be cute. They have a big ad campaign that catches a lot of folks’ attention. I don’t blame folks for going with the name they know, but there’s really a whole world of other hosts out there that seem to be more motivated to offer more features, more customer service and easier interfaces at the same price.

After these messages, we'll be right back...

If you’re starting anew, I strongly recommend DreamHost, which I have been using, I swear, since April of 1999 — for reference, that was two months before the debut of Napster.

The pricing has always been great, the customer service has been ridiculously good to me and their system very easy to manage. Plenty of the usual perks, too, like one-click installs of WordPress, Joomla, phpBB and MediaWiki as well as easy implementation of ChartBeat, Google AdWords and more.

And they get brownie points with me for being carbon-neutral since 2007 and an EPA-approved green power user since 2009.

And yes, I’ll get a very small cut for referring you if you use this link.

But, as the fella says, don’t take my word for it. Here are a bunch of DreamHost reviews and a bunch of GoDaddy reviews.

OK, OK, that’s enough. Back to business, right? I just wanted to get this out there while people are talking about web hosts….

Trying out social media tools is a bit like speed dating. | Photo: Flickr user linh.m.do

I asked Facebook which tools people like best right now, specifically mentioning Pinterest and Google+, but intentionally omitting Path.

Should’ve known that Path would be the one that got talked about anyway. Max pointed me to a post saying “Path is what I enjoyed most about Facebook before it turned into the Internet platform: a social network for your private, personal network.”

Yes, I think that’s a pretty accurate statement for something so short and ripped from its context. And I like Path. It’s very attractive, which is exactly what Ef told me when I asked him about it. My problem is that I’m a little tired of convincing my loved ones to try a new thing with me (though not as tired, I’m sure, as they are of that rigmarole). So while I’m excited to experiment with it myself, that’s about all I can do because it’s a tool that feels like it’s specifically built to exclude publishers. Somebody will prove me wrong, but I don’t want to create a Colorado Daily account on Path and start trying to connect with people. Imagine how creepy that would have been to you on “2005-era Facebook.”

From the parislemon post:

Williams broader point about social network overlap is a good one. Most of us are at the point now where if a new social network comes into our lives, it means getting rid of an old one — Flickr -> Instagram, for example. That’s a pretty big problem for new social networks going forward. They can’t just be good, they have to be really, really good to make up for a switching cost. Or they have to be totally different — but even something totally different means time spent there instead of elsewhere. Something will probably be cut.

Somewhere in a dark corner of my brain, there’s a party going on. I’m an early adopter, so I’m on tons of these networks — and I give up on them just as quickly as I sign up, most of the time. The mentality provided above is great for these reasons: fear of being obsoleted should keep social tools relevant (or else!) and I’m excited that we’re in a place now where we’re not just looking back at Friendster and Myspace as the left-behind communities but Flickr! I mean, Flickr! I use it all the time. And yet, for social purposes (which mine aren’t), Instagram is where it’s at. Apple even named it app of the year. But don’t get married to it — something smarter and sexier will come along eventually.

So apps are subject to natural selection now more than ever. What does that mean for us? Gotta research and do some good guesswork and groundwork where you think there will be traction.

Social media tools and choosing what to use them for

Happily, the insightful post Max sent me to also sent me to another really insightful post on the myriad social networks and what the author uses them for. Inspired by those posts, here’s the quickest look I can manage at a whole slew of tools and how I use them (and I’ll be updating the partial list I recently published sometime after a bit more experimentation).

Remember the early days of Twitter? A bit of lively conversation and room for a lot more. | Photo: Library and Archives Canada

I’m using Google+ the way I used Twitter in the early days: Before most news orgs are any good at this network or devote any time to it because the critical mass isn’t quite there yet, I’m posting semi-frequently on a niche topic: the U.S. west and the environment. It’s an interesting time for the west and energy issues, I live here and nobody’s really doing it. Not even High Country News, whose mission is nearly exactly that subject, had put much into it before late December.

It remains to be seen what the network’s voice will turn out to be, but if you want a possible peek into the future, follow Breaking News. (Obviously, I disagree with Justin on Google+ is the nerdier Facebook — it feels more like Twitter to me from a publishing perspective. I’ll probably be proven wrong on that, but right now it’s not all that networky-feeling to me. Maybe because I’m landlocked? Are you coastal types feeling like G+ is the new Facebook?)

Tumblr still falls into a bit of a hole for me. I like the interface and it’s really attractive when used well, but I’d rather blog here when I’ve got something to say. Outside of that, it’s all reblogging and images. So I tried tumbling images I found striking. Pinterest does the striking-image thing, too, with an audience focused a bit more on material goods of the omigodwant variety. And I kind of like how easy it is to make separate buckets for things under one name or brand. I started off with a catch-all bucket, and one each for bicycles, places to visit in the west, space (outer) and space (negative). In the end, do I need either one? Not really.

I think Ashley has done a nice job in meeting the medium’s voice with the Daily’s Tumblr.

There are good places for institutional Pinterest accounts to go, too. Here’s the Travel Channel’s, for starters. And here’s some more Pinterest stuff to think about.

Facebook is in a weird transition place for me. I’d used it for just personal stuff and created a “Fan” page for web + journalism. That’s just another place to drive people to, though, so I’m probably going to retire it as I’ve been using my personal Facebook account for more public posts of late, mostly but not exclusively relating to Boulder and Colorado Daily stuff — and less for keeping up with friends. So it’s kind of become another soapbox. In fact, we had a lively chat about yesterday’s blog post there.

If I had very close friends already on Path – and I’m thinking of like five or six people right now –  that’s probably where I’d keep up with friends. But I send a lot of email for that purpose and that solution is fine for me.

Twitter, like Facebook, is an outlet for stuff that relates to my job in Boulder. (For the past two weeks, I’ve been sort of on vacation mode, so there’s not as much stuff there.) But I do a lot more responding and conversing there than broadcasting. That speaks to the richness of the experience and the depth of the many communities on Twitter. It’s really not the early-adopter crowd anymore.

I also used Twitter as the placeholder tool for removing commenting functions from a hypothetical site in an argument I made yesterday. I’d rather have short conversations there than in comments.

I don’t use Instagram or Flickr socially. Instagram seems redundant to me. Want to peg your photo to a location? See below. Want to peg it to a brand? Use Twitter. But what do I know?

Check in! | Photo: Flickr user whatleydude

I like Foursquare a lot. Yelp and Stamped are competitors here with opposite virtues: Yelp is established and has a large community and web presence. Stamped is new and hot and, at the moment, iPhone-only. But I like the way Foursquare works much more. I use it with friends, but it’s probably closer to the truth that I use it like a video game, trying to unlock achievements. Why? Don’t know. Steve Buttry has some thoughts on why. But it basically boils down to the fact that location is fun and interesting and there’s always something new in the world of restaurants, bars and local businesses. And I like the tips on Foursquare more than the ratings on Yelp — for some reason, it seems like irritated customers who had one bad experience can screw up a business’s Yelp page all by their lonesome, but on Foursquare you get a broader picture. It’s not some long Larry David-inspired diatribe — it’s “Come hungry and get the masala dosa.” Lists are cool, too.

We use Foursquare for the Colorado Daily as well, and like the “personal” account much more than we like the “business” account right now. But that might not last.

Too much stuff?

If it’s all starting to sound like a lot of tools, it is, and that’s why some must die off. Steve Buttry’s year-end look at his year in digital journalism sent me pinballing around the web a bit, but I ended up reading the account of the Denver Post’s large social media success with a photo of a mountain lion and a very large cat staring at one another through a window.

Steve sums up:

The social tools I count in this story: Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, Picasa, Reddit, Tumblr and email. You can’t just seize on a favorite tool such as Twitter or Facebook. The digital journalist needs to be comfortable using several tools and learning new tools.

Good luck! And please tell me if you see news orgs using any of these tools in a particularly cool way!

Ah, online comments. | Photo: flickr user mikeinlondon

If I am in a particularly good mood and think that my new friends will indulge me, I will expand the question: If, as director of a news organization, you could hire one of the following positions, but only one, which would it be: Your only copy editor, your only social media “host” or “manager,” your only online comment moderator or one more reporter for any beat, which you can define? (I’d love to hear your own answers, by the way.)

Online commenting takes up a huge amount of mental real estate for journalists relative to what it deserves. You might not think that for some pretty legitimate reasons — maybe you think it doesn’t because you don’t see a whole lot of journalists wade into the comments themselves. Maybe just because you think that journalists are the worst. I don’t know. But they’re thinking about the comments, I promise.

Personally, I’ve had the conversation so many times as to have a number of potential commenting models (including kill comments always and forever) floating around in my head. Here is the model du jour, for your approval or ridicule:

Call me crazy: Move comments to Twitter

The Hypothetical City Daily Bugle has a large community of commenters. A few of them are insightful and useful, but somewhere around 90 percent of the comments made fall into the categories of irrelevant, inflammatory, libelous or otherwise rude. What are the problems with this? Well, in addition to potentially exposing the publication to some kind of legal trouble down the road (“I read on TheDailyBugleTheWebsite dot com that the chief of police killed a man! I saw it in that section right below the main story!”), it has actually come to a point where sources are less likely to want to be interviewed because they know that the commenters seize upon names in stories online and say rude things in the comments if they disagree with the sources. So the comments are actually slowly whittling down the pool of sources in the Daily Bugle’s coverage area, which obviously weakens the journalism.

So now what?

Move the conversation off-site. Determine a hashtag that’s not in wide use, say, #dbchat for Daily Bugle chat. List it at the bottom of each story. Seed the hashtag with questions about talker stories. Monitor it for useful or insightful comments. Using Twitter’s new “embed this tweet” functionality, embed tweets when appropriate. That looks like this:

Commenters: Hey, now you’ve got a freewheeling, instant-publish comment zone! No more waiting for approval! Plus, if your comments are good (or, I suppose, especially inflammatory) you’ll get more Twitter followers.

News orgs: Now you’ve got what could be a rolling 24-hours-a-day conversation about your news brand out on Twitter.

Sources: When you send a story you were quoted in to grandma, she won’t see the comments — unless she follows the hashtag.

What do you think about making each social media account hit a different niche? I’m talking about personal accounts, but we can discuss the institutional implications, too.

Institutional

At the Colorado Daily, I’ve assigned one reporter to mainly handle Twitter and one to mainly handle Tumblr. I mainly handle the Facebook page. Everybody checks in on Foursquare.

I like the consistency of voice you get from doing this — and the fact that developing relationships with readers and followers is a lot more natural. I think I want to play up the individuals more than I already do. Jenn is mentioned in the Twitter bio and Ashley is mentioned on the Tumblr page, but I think we can go further than that.

Naturally, you’re going to get different results with different people in charge of these things. Jenn, our outdoor recreation reporter, might post more outdoorsy stuff on our Twitter account (though I’ll tell you she does a great job of mixing it up) than if I were to run it. So it’s got her voice a lot of the time.

Personal

I’m on everything. Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, G+, Foursquare… you name it. And right now, I post a pretty reasonable cross-section of my interests on all of those, with an emphasis on Boulder, since that’s the focus of my job.

But does that serve my followers?

I gained the vast majority of my Twitter followers — I think — tweeting nearly exclusively about energy and environment issues. Does it bother them that I’m focused much more on Boulder (which happens to be a pretty green city)? I know I’ve unfollowed folks after they switch jobs.

So here’s my question: If I focus each account on a different niche I’m into, does that serve me and my networks better? Do I get a richer experience from that? Do I get more engagement?

Seems reasonable.

So I’m thinking about trying it out.

The plan, for now

Twitter: Boulder. That’s just where I’m most effective and where the largest number of voices interact with me. So it has to default to the thing I’m paid to do. And I’ve been here in Boulder and tweeting for two years — no sense in changing it up now. A huge number of the people I follow are based here, and I prune regularly. If I were to start over, I’d probably do it a different way and put my shoulder into the institutional account for local stuff and keep the personal account for broader things, since it’s so easy to interact with Twitter for national and international issues.

Google+: News of interest to the broader American West region, including environment, energy, immigration and pertinent features-y things. This is largely because I have no outlet for this other than pelting my wife with links — and because I want to see what I do with those topics and how they intersect.

Tumblr: Right now it’s just stuff I like looking at. It’ll probably keep being that way until I figure out something smarter to do with Tumblr.

Facebook: Pretty scattershot right now here, too. Plan TK.

Since there’s no easy way to get your newshound a scoop or a source or, say, a raise, here’s my quick-and-dirty tipsheet for parents, family, significant others and friends shopping for journalizin’ types.

BIG-TICKET ITEMS

Oh my, you’re generous. Here are a couple of sought-after gadgets.

The iPad 2 is the tablet. Doesn’t make much sense to look around, from what I can tell.

That said, I love my Android phone — a Samsung Nexus S 4G Android Phone (Sprint) – so maybe take a quick peek at the Samsung Galaxy Tab (10.1-Inch, 16GB, Wi-Fi)
and the Samsung Galaxy Tab (7-inch, 16GB, Wi-Fi) – among the best reviewed Android tablets.

You might think about getting your giftee a Kindle Fire with wi-fi, or a Kindle Touch with wi-fi,, but my sources say that the Kindle Keyboard is really the better product — if you’re just looking to read books and magazines.

READING MATERIAL — PERIODICALS

To be honest, my New York Times digital subscription has been good, but the Weekender New York Times home delivery is better. It’s comparably priced and you get Friday, Saturday and Sunday papers — which means all the good stuff your journo wants, like the New York Times Magazine, Week in Review, Sunday Sports… and it’s more than enough reading material for a whole week.

Beyond that, most digital subscriptions are handy, but you should ask your journalist what she or he wants to read! Don’t just subscribe them to what you think they want — or worse, what you’d want to read. Never works out well.

READING MATERIAL — BOOKS

Everyone’s taste in books is different, of course, but here are a couple of good, broad bets, based on some journalism stereotypes.

Vonnegut: Is your journalist both cynical and idealistic? Darkly funny? Cat’s Cradle: A Novel
and Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel are the staples, and for the Vonnegut reader who already has it all, you’ll want to go with And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, a recently released biography from interviews taken just before the beloved author’s death. Here’s a review.

Murakami: Does your journalist enjoy whiskey, seek adventure and perhaps harbor a secret longing to wear a fedora? A Wild Sheep Chase: A Novel and Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Vintage International) – a collection of stories — serve as a great introduction to the very hip Japanese novelist, and his latest is 1Q84.

Ehrenreich: Is your journalist always, uh, spicing up conversations with sobering diatribes about life in America? Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is her most famous work and Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America is her most recent. She is not, by the way, a subject of my expertise, but another young journalist recommended I put her on the gift guide. Your mileage may vary!

McCulloch: Are you uncomfortable talking to your journalist about anything that happened after about World War I? You might think about a gift card to your journalist’s local book store.

CLOTHES

Gift card time. For men, CLAD (which has an Esquire partnership) and Blank Label would make for smart and unexpected choices. For women, get in the car with her and ask her where you’re going.

CONSUMABLES

Be the life of the party without having to go to the party! Oban Single Malt 14 Year Old 750ML, Tuthilltown Spirits Hudson Baby Bourbon Whiskey 375 mL (Half Bottle) and a Starter Home Brewery With Organic Nut Brown Ale Ingredients are all serious crowd-pleasers.