Resources

I use Pinboard to bookmark interesting websites related to ENGL 5644, but I will try to add the most important resources to this page. If you’d like me to add a link to this page, just let me know.

Virginia Tech Resources

Social Media Analysis

Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet, aka TAGS (useful for archiving all posts containing a specific word or hashtag)
TAGS Explorer (visualization tool for the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet)
Martin Hawksey’s list of social monitoring tools and recipes (from the creator of TAGS)
All My Tweets (simple web app to harvest all tweets from a particular user)
“How To: Backup And Search All Your Friends’ Tweets In Google Reader“
TweetBackup (only works for your own tweets)
Mentionmapp (visualization tool to see connections between Twitter users and hashtags)
NameGenWeb (visualization tool to analyze your Facebook network)
Zeebly (visualization tool to analyze your Facebook network)
Vizify (visualization tool for analyzing your social media presence across several services)
Gephi (powerful visualization software for a variety of network analysis tasks)
Voyant Tools (“a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts”)

Models for Various “Digital Self” Genres

The Setup (a great collection of formalized interviews about how people “get stuff done”)
Lifehacker’s “How I Work” series (check the sidebar for a long list of previous interviews)
“Apocalypse Prep 101: Digital Backup Strategy,” by Mike McLeod
“Using Twitter for Curated Academic Content,” by Allan Johnson
“Going Paperless: Reading and Researching Using Evernote, Clipper, and Clearly,” by Jamie Todd Rubin
“How a Wedding Planner Uses Evernote,” by Barbara Pederzini
“Embarrassments of Riches: Managing Research Assets,” by Miriam Posner
“A Workflow for Digital Research Using Off-the-Shelf Tools,” by William J. Turkel

Domain Registration and Web Hosting

To register a domain name, I recommend using one of these four companies:

All three of those companies also offer web hosting, but I recommend separating your domain registrar from your hosting company, just in case you need to change hosting companies at some point in the future.

There are hundreds of web hosting companies out there, and each one has a slightly different plan and slightly different fees. Before you settle on a hosting company, carefully investigate the company’s reputation (i.e., Google them, search for them on Twitter) and make sure that the plan you are signing up for offers the resources you’ll need for your site (e.g., MySQL databases, WordPress support, unlimited subdomains).

For hosting, I have been very happy with MediaTemple for several years, and I recommend the company to most of my clients. However, MediaTemple’s plans start at $20/month, which is more than some students (or their clients) want to pay. I hesitate to endorse other hosting companies without having used them myself, but I have students and trusted friends who have used all of the following companies with success:

Bluehost
DreamHost (Offers free accounts for registered nonprofit organizations)
HostMonster
SiteGround
A Small Orange
NearlyFreeSpeech
Apis Networks
IPOWER

FTP Clients

FileZilla (Mac, Windows, and Linux; free)
Cyberduck (Mac and Windows; free)
Fetch (Mac; free for educational use)
Fugu (Mac; free)
Free FTP (Windows; free)
WinSCP (Windows; free)
Transmit (Mac; $34 and worth every penny)

HTML/CSS Editors

TextWrangler (Mac)
Notepad++ (Windows)
TextMate (Mac)

Static HTML/CSS Templates

WordPress Resources

Quinn’s Favorite WordPress Tools

Easy-to-Customize Themes

Helpful Plugins for Portfolio Sites

Jetpack (a collection of plugins that enables many of the features available on WordPress.com)
Akismet (greatly reduces “comment spam”)
Contact Form 7 (creates custom forms that let visitors send you email through your site)
Google Analytics (adds tracking code to each page to monitor visits to your site)
Google Doc Embedder (allows you to display MS Word, PDF, and lots of other file types inside your site)
NextGEN Gallery (simplifies the creation, management, and display of images, especially groups of images)
PHPEnkoder (protects your email address from being harvested by spambots)
Twitter Widget Pro (displays your tweets on your site)
My Custom CSS (allows you to create custom CSS rules that override your theme’s CSS without modifying the theme’s files)
Widget Context (lets you specify which pages display particular sidebar widgets)
SimplePie (allows you to import, adjust, and display almost any RSS feed)