Author: Laurel L. Russwurm

is a self publishing novelist and photographer.

Comment on Free Culture Film Festival #SFD by Laurel L. Russwurm

In reply to Wayne Borean aka The Mad Hatter.

It is all there, but now that you mention it, it was kind of cluttered with info. So here is just the list:

10:00am: Charade (1963)
Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn – running time: 113 minutes

12:00pm: Never Weaken (1921)
Harold Lloyd, Mildred Davis – running time: 29 minutes

12:30pm: His Girl Friday (1940)
Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell – running time: 92 min

2:00pm: “Superman” (1941)
Fleisher Studios animated Superman short – running time: 11 min

2:15pm: “Sintel” (2010)
Computer Animated tale of a girl and a dragon – running time: 14 min

2:30pm “Sita Sings the Blues” (2008)
Nina Paley’s classical animation feature – running time: 82 min

3:50pm “Superman: The Billion Dollar Limited” (1942)
Fleisher Studios animated Superman short – running time: 9 min

You Need A Web Presence…

… if you are in business for yourself or if you are an organization with a public face.

If you are starting your own business, if you do free-lance work (or want to), if you are an independent musician, actor, artist, writer, cartoonist, or self-publisher, you need to have your own website, so when anyone searches for your name in a web browser (sometimes referred to as “googling”) they will find you. That way, they can find you and contract for your services (and you can continue to pay the rent and feed the kids)

If you have a Public Service Organization, or a Charity, Fan Club, Guild or any other public organization, you need to a website so people will can find your organization online so they can join up or donate so your group can keep the lights on.

Libreleft books: My Business Blog

The First thing you need is your very own Domain Name

Domain names are unique. There can only be one Libreleft.com and I own that — so long as I pay my annual fee, no one else on the Internet can have that Domain Name.

In the beginning, Domain Name Registration was free, but now it will cost you something, and what it costs varies.

Don’t Use:

A lot of people choose one called GoDaddy because its cheap, but I heave heard such a variety of horror stories, I can’t possibly suggest that — in fact, I will always strongly advise against it. If you can find pages of horror stories about any service, it is probably a good idea to walk on by.

use

I am extremely happy with my Domain Registrar, Register For Less because they have proven very trustworthy from a privacy standpoint (at least until Edward Snowden tells me different — but I don’t think he will.) R4L has always offered Whois Privacy without charge.

Of course, I have no experience with any other Domain Name Registrar, so don’t take my word for it, do research :)

The second thing you need is a Web Host

If you are tech savvy enough to host your own website, you won’t need this article (although you probably know someone who does). If you don’t, you will need to contract with a commercial website Hosting service.on a local service, OR do so through a web platform.

Should you Hire a Pro?

It is certainly easier to pay someone to do it all for you, but there are a couple of things you need to be aware of before you do.

Even if you don’t know what HTML is, the first thing you must insist on is that you have access and control over the website you are paying for. The thing you don’t want to happen is that after you pay for your website but the web designer actually owns your Domain Name and has total control of your site. That can effectively force you to do business with that Web Designer forever and the biggest risk is that you build your brand but lose control of it.

Horror story: I know one non-profit organization that had a volunteer design its site and register the domain name… and when there was a falling out, the guy with the domain locked the organization out and the organization lost all access to its own online content and had to start over from scratch. They could have won in court, but most non-profits don’t want to or can’t afford to go that route.

I am not suggesting web designers are evil, but even the nicest web designer might not always be around. If your web designer controls the only “keys to” your site, and you lose contact with your web designer, you lose control of your site — and your brand. This can have the unhappy side effect of costing you work if your contact information changes.

It is important to have access to your own site after you’ve paid for it, even if you contract with your designer to maintain it, things change. If you suffer financial reverses, you might not be able to continue to pay to have this done for you. And you should always be able to switch to another professional should circumstances warrant it, or maybe you just want access so your grandkid can make regular updates for you.

Or should you Do It Yourself?

There are many different ways to do a website; some want lots of bells and whistles, so if you’re new at this, there will be a pretty steep learning curve.

When you have a domain name and a web host, you need to have something to put there. The most basic function of any website is to serve as a calling card that explains who you are and what you or your organization does and provide a way that your friends, clients and fans can contact you.

A Static Web Page

A basic website is built with a programming language, the current version of which is HTML5. It isn’t particularly difficult, but it isn’t easy either. I learned HTML from a startlingly easy to use set of online tutorials on an awesome website called HTMLdog. (I bought the printed manual to support the author, because it was worth it. And I plug it wherever I can because it was just that good. When I learned it was XHTML, but the whole site has been updated to the new HTML5 standard).

HTML is the primary language of the Internet… as far as I know email and blogs are written in HTML or a variant. So if you have the time to learn how to do it, you can build your own web page in HTML5. This is great for things that rarely change, like your mission statement or FAQ, sample work, list of credits or résumé.

Pretty nearly any website you have to log into in order to use gives the user the option of a profile page. Always fill these in, and include your contact information. If you want to be contacted, the more places people can find you, the better.

There are also web platforms specifically designed to serve as an online business card. Here’s my about.me page and my artist sister Liana Russwurm’s see.me page.

A Blog Web Page

Blog software has changed the Internet, because it makes it much easier to add new content to keep your website fresh.

There are lots of great blog platforms — WordPress, Tumblr, BlogSpot, LiveJournal — as well as some I’ve only just heard of, like Weebly and Overblog — so you can set up a free blog on a variety of web services. This is my historian-writer brother Lani Russwurm’s visual history blog Past Tense on Tumblr, and it’s previous incarnation on Wordpress and it’s original incarnation on blogspot.

Increasingly non-blogging websites like Flickr and GoodReads are allowing users to blog as well.

A blog can be used to discuss and share some of your work with your fans, as cartoonist Nina Paley does, or it can be entirely new content with a view to finding an audience, as my humorist (and/or science fiction) writer brother Larry Russwurm does

I like Tumblr for my visual blogs; I like the archive features (users can look at thumbnails of your entire blog, and I also like the ability to password protect content and allow people to see it without having to register or log in (sometimes called a “registration wall” because users must register (which entails giving out personal information) as well as using a password to access protected content). You can also use it like a regular blog, alothough if you want to have comments, you need to use Disqus to do it. If you decide to use Tumblr, 10 Tips For Problogging On Tumblr has some excellent advice.

My other favorite is Wordpress, which can be used in different ways:

  • You can set up an entirely free blog ~ my first blog is still at WordPress.com. When your free blog starts getting traffic, WordPress will start posting ads there, so you needn’t feel guilty about getting a “free lunch”.
  • If you decide to go ad-free, you can subscribe to a commercial package from Wordpress, which gives you the ability to post your own video (you can only embed from YouTube in the free version) and you can even get your domain name from there
  • You can download the WordPress software (free as in gratis and free as in freedom) from WordPress.org and create a website to host yourself.
  • Even if you choose to blog on WordPress.com as a trial, and decide later you want to self host, you candownload the whole thing and reconstitute it as a self hosted blog if you wish.
This is my Gravatar on my Author blog, but I also use it anywhere anywhere I need an avatar image.

This is my Gravatar on my Author blog, but I also use it anywhere anywhere I need an avatar image.

An avatar — that little photo of you that appears on Facebook, or Twitter or wherever — is the visual manifestation of your “brand.”  It should be your logo if you’re an organization or a business; if you’re an independent contractor or creator, it should be you. Either way, it should be consistent, because like any brand, people will see in a blink that it’s you. Whether or not you use WordPress, you should sign up for a Gravatar; that way when you make comments in many places, your chosen image will accompany what you write.

recommendation

Many of my blog articles (like this one) are something I’ve written because I know someone who needs the information. A lot of people use FaceBook as their calling card, but do you really want to mix your business and personal contacts? If you are using facebook as your business presence, it is necessary to use a Facebook Page, because what you post on your personal page can not be seen outside Facebook.

One of the things I dislike most about Facebook is that all posts you make there are not seen by everyone in your friends list, and Facebook is forever twiddling with the Timeline order in which your posts appear.  And of course, posts can easily get lost. It can be virtually impossible to try and find something you posted on Facebook a while back. Things don’t just disappear off a real website or a blog under your own control.

Even if you’re a big Facebook fan, it’s possible to set Wordpress or Tumblr blogs to post to Facebook.

If all you want right now is a basic online “calling card” my own recommendation would be to choose the blog software you like best and use that to make a static web page. Later on, if you want to expand it into a blog, you’ll be halfway there.

Libre.fm

Libre.fm:

sonata-green:

A streaming music site, like Last.fm or Pandora, but with all Free Culture music.

As a consequence, a bunch of nice features are possible that would otherwise give the lawyers heart attacks. For example, there are no ads and no DRM or anything, so the in-browser player is super lightweight. You can skip as much as you want, seek around within a track, and replay previous tracks. And, unlike the last time I tried the site a year or two ago, the music is actually good.

Libre.fm

Libre.fm:

sonata-green:

A streaming music site, like Last.fm or Pandora, but with all Free Culture music.

As a consequence, a bunch of nice features are possible that would otherwise give the lawyers heart attacks. For example, there are no ads and no DRM or anything, so the in-browser player is super lightweight. You can skip as much as you want, seek around within a track, and replay previous tracks. And, unlike the last time I tried the site a year or two ago, the music is actually good.

Comment on What is the Public Domain? by Laurel L. Russwurm

In reply to Crosbie Fitch.

I think I’ve learned more about copyright and rights in general from you than anyone, so I’m sorry to have to disagree with you on this one, Crosbie. In Canada when people assert their liberty as you suggest we run the risk of breaking the law, which carries increasingly draconian consequences. While it is true that some copyright martyrs may provide good examples that may lead to the abolition of copyright law, I would rather warn people away from such risks and any further loss of liberty that may ensue.

Liberty is indeed the useful concept, but is even more powerful when the modern concept of the “public domain” is employed to usefully demonstrate its loss. It is crucial for people to understand the concept of the public domain as it was before the first copyright monopoly existed, and to further be aware of how and why the ghost of the public domain we are left with is shrinking if we are to understand the issue. Understanding that modern copyright’s incursions into the public domain every time some new “protection” is retroactively helps people see the liberty that is being lost. Here in Canada our new copyright law makes it illegal to circumvent DRM for any reason, even to access public domain works in our possession. In Europe the absurd “sweat of the brow” doctrine has been accepted and is routinely used by Galleries, Libraries, Archive and Museums to assert copyright over works that have been forever in the public domain simply by scanning them.

Every person who says “I can do what I want to, I can circumvent DRM, so it doesn’t affect me” doesn’t care if the law is changed or not — until the law is dropped on their head. Every person who doesn’t vote because the electoral system is unfair ensures that bad laws — benefiting only special interests at the expense of the public — will continue to be made and enforced.

When the law is an ass, it needs to be changed, or abolished, not flouted.

Comment on Why CanCon Hurts Canadian Culture [part 1] by Laurel L. Russwurm

In reply to Jay Johnson.

Certainly our fashions have been influenced by our near total diet of American culture. But years ago I was told American co-workers that Canadian Football (CFL not soccer) was superior to American football. I’m not one to judge, as it seems to me that today’s televised sports seem more like reality tv than actual sporting competitions. Live sports in which we participate are something else again. Baseball was the big one when i was a kid, but in my little corner of Canada it has been thoroughly supplanted by soccer for my child’s generation.

Mostly Canadians watch American media because we believe (wrongly) that our own is inferior. Canada has long had a rich cultural heritage, once celebrated by the brilliant work of the NFB. Even the CBC has produced good work on the rare occasion it has risen above the politics that normally weighs it down. A case can be made that the North American English Accent prevalent in American media is more Canadian than American.

Like our American friends, the food Canadians eat is based on a mixture of indigenous food and the cuisines brought here by various waves of European settlers, so certainly there is similarity in our diets.

I agree that the idea of CanCon is to keep us “Un-American” (and give Canadians jobs) but I very strongly disagree with your contention that there is no Canadian Culture. Not because so many talented Canadian creators flock to the American culture capitals (although an argument could be made that so many Canadians must certainly be Canadianising American culture) but because Canadian Culture is in fact thriving for the first time in decades thanks to technological advances that make it possible for us to both digitally self publish our own creative works and then distribute them both at home and abroad. This is effectively breaking the stranglehold the handful of multimedia conglomerates (aka “the copyright industry”) have imposed on us for most of the past century. Pretty nearly any Canadian can go out and make a movie, record a song or publish a book. And that’s a good thing.

Comment on Why CanCon Hurts Canadian Culture [part 1] by Jay Johnson

CanCon is there because they want us to stay un-American. Except we only watch American tv, movies, music, etc. Our sports are wholly American. Our accents are too, plus our food, way of life and even our clothing. There is no such thing as Canadian Culture, it’s a joke. We already are American, and to shove second rate Canadian crap down our throats while all the actually talented Candadians are in USA masquerading as Yanks makes every intelligent person on Earth think Canada is stupid and silly. Thanks government! Again……