tutorial

Quite nifty! My mini-tutorial — Five Tips for Smarter Playlists — has been published in the second issue of the online pdf magazine CRAM. A few weeks ago I received an email from one of their editors requesting permission to republish the essay. I had actually forgotten all about it. Then this morning someone at CRAM sent me an email announcing that the latest issue has been published. My article begins on page six. How cool is that?

Several people have asked me how to add random text strings to a web page, so I thought I’d write a little tutorial. All you need is a text editor and a web site. If you publish your own blog, I’m sure you’ll be able to do this. If you follow these simple instructions, you should be able to add the same feature to your web site.

I am by no means an expert on the subject, and there may be better ways to do this, but it has worked for me. If you have suggestions or improvements, please let me know.
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I receive many messages similar to this one:

so what if I want to set up a blog and play with it for a bit before I publish it to the world? How would you recommend I go about that? Do I need my own domain and hosting service first?

Here’s what I can tell you. In order to have a blog, you need a place to *put* it first. (First you have to register your domain (e.g. myblog.com). That is done through a registrar. My favorite is dotster.com.) Once you have a domain registered, you have to have some web space on which to host your site. You do that with a host. That’s (basically) the computer on which your web site resides.

You don’t have to have your own domain, though. Most ISPs allow you some web space on which you can host a page. I think AOL does and I’m almost sure that Earthlink does, too. In that case you would have space at (for example) http://www.aol.com/yourusername/ and then you could put your blog there.

Blogger is a free service that provides both a blogging system and web space, through Blog*Spot. That’s probably the best place to go if you’re a beginner.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but hopefully that’s enough to get you started. If you’re interested in having your own blog, please let me know if I can help in any way.