Friday, April 8, 2011
QUICK QUESTION
I am trying to figure out how to store some of the lengthy multi-part essays I have posted online so that folks can access them easily. The UNC help desk told me about DropBox. Does anyone know anything about it? Is it safe? I don't need something secure -- I am happy to give the world access to the materials I store. I just want someone to be able easily to find my Autobiography, or my Formal Methods tutorial, or the Marx tutorial, etc etc. Suggestions?
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7 comments:
Professor Wolff,
Dropbox is convenient to use, both as backup for your data files and to synchronize your files on different computers (such as your desktop, notebook, and ipad). It also automatically stores a backlog of your data files for the past 30 days (more if you pay for an account), so that if you accidentally delete data you can recover them within that timeframe. And if you use 2 GB or less, it is also free.
There are various other backup and synchronizing websites, Dropbox is the most popular I think, but I also use Sugarsync for extra free space (5 GB there).
If you like, you can also buy a portable USB drive or a hard drive for cheap these days, think I saw external hard drives with 1 terabyte capacity (that's 1000 GB) selling for 75$.
As for saving your blog posts,
I've saved your formal methods and Karl Marx series on my computer for my own convenience, and you can easily download them from here:
https://www.sugarsync.com/share/cm76a3fft752m
There are two folders at the link, and you can check the checkbox at the very top to select both folders and download them.
(That's another convenience of Dropbox and Sugarsync, you can share files easily without having to email them as attachments.)
As for saving each blog post, I only know how to do that manually and separately for each post, which is time-consuming. Maybe someone knows an easier way!
p.s. For each of your post, there's an option for attaching a category or tag to it, which would make it very easy to locate the posts on your blog. But this will also be time-consuming, because it means revisiting for instance every autobiographical post and assigning it to the "Autobiography" category.
Professor Wolff, with online backup and synchronization services like Dropbox and Sugarsync, it's easy to share files with others. I happen to have your Formal Methods and Karl Marx series saved for my own convenience using Sugarsync, so here's how it would look like if you used it:
https://www.sugarsync.com/share/cm76a3fft752m
Dropbox is fantastic. I use it as my dedicated method of storing/distributing/sharing documents for my students.
Two other possibilities are:
Google Docs, which gives the option of wholly unrestricted access, invited access, or private (though probably not high-security.)
http://docs.google.com/support/?hl=en
Tiddlyspot
which allows easy creation of notes in a wiki format, with tagging. It would probably be more suitable for the Karl Marx series than for a longer ordered narrative such as the autobiography.
http://tiddlyspot.com/?page=about
http://tiddlyspot.com/?page=gallery
There is a nice example from a philosophy professor at Wesleyan
http://reasoningwell.tiddlyspot.com
Oops, it looks like you have to create a Sugarsync account to access the link to my shared folders. Likewise for Dropbox. It's free to open an account, but still it's a hassle.
The trick is to provide a public link from your Dropbox or similar account that everyone can access at the click of a mouse. The public link also avoids giving people shared access to your computer files, so it's much safer I think. The only problem is that you can only create public links for individual files, not entire folders.
My suggestion then is to compress the files you want to share into a single zip file, and provide a public link to that file which the readers can easily unzip. The zipping and unzipping is a quick and easy process.
So for example, here is my public Dropbox link to the zip file of all of Professor Wolff's blog posts on the Formal Methods series:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1899431/Robert%20Paul%20Wolff%20-%20Formal%20Methods%20in%20Political%20Philosophy.zip
And my public Dropbox link to the zip file of the Karl Marx series:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1899431/Robert%20Paul%20Wolff%20-%20The%20Thought%20of%20Karl%20Marx.zip
For copyright reasons, I did not include any published articles that Professor Wolff mentioned in his series, only the blog content.
I use Dropbox for all of my active teaching and research materials, and it works great for me (I don't make anything public, though). It means I don't have to carry my laptop to campus (or even a flash drive), since everything automatically syncs across multiple platforms (and I can even read any of my current documents on my phone, when I'm stuck somewhere and still need to get things done). It seems adequately secure to me, though I wouldn't put any kind of financial information on there.
Why not just post each document as a separate blog in blogspot. Just upload the texts in as large or small chunks as you want as blog posts. So the Marx for example would be its own blog with the individual chapters being posts. People could then comment on them without altering them. Each individual blog could then appear as a link on the (sorry)master blog.
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