P.Mean >> Category >> Website details (created 2007-10-01). 

These pages explain new developments at this website. Articles are arranged by date with the most recent entries at the top. These articles are presented in alphabetical order. You can find outside resources at the bottom of this page.

2011

14. P.Mean: My special Zotero style (created 2011-02-22). I use Zotero to produce html code for the "Outside Resource" section of my category pages. It requires a special style which I have adapted. Here is the code for that style.

2010

13. P.Mean: My new twitter account (created 2010-09-15). I started a new twitter account, mostly to follow the twitter feed of the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics at UMKC. I work in that department part-time. I may use my twitter account to announce new updates to my website. My twitter feed is @profmean, and you can view my tweets at http://twitter.com/profmean.

12. P.Mean: What makes a good website (created 2010-04-07). Someone posed a series of questions  about what makes a perfect website design. I am not a big fan of "design" and tried to make that point in my responses.

2009

11. P.Mean: Developing a website logo (created 2009-05-22). I'm not big on graphic logos, but the Zotero website asked for one. So I wrote a short R program to create a simple logo.

10. P.Mean: NYTimes advice on increasing website traffic (created 2009-05-11). The New York Times has an excellent blog entry on increasing traffic to your website. It is well worth reading if you write a lot of stuff for the web. I had a few additional comments which I added in the comment section of this webpage.

9. P.Mean: Can I use you as a teaching example (created 2009-04-20). I frequently ask people for permission to talk about the projects I am helping them with, as they make great teaching examples. Some people say no, and that's fine. I do offer a discount for paying clients if you let me talk about this work on my web pages. One person raised an important issue when I asked. That person asked me to keep details about his/her organization anonymous if I was illustrating any boneheaded mistakes.

8. P.Mean: I love to write (or my newsletters are getting longer) (created 2009-03-19). In high school and college I dreaded writing term papers. Something has changed because now I love to write. I started a monthly newsletter, and it's length seems to be growing with each month. Here are some statistics on newsletter lengths.

2008

7. The Monthly Mean: Can I ask you a question? (November 2008)

6. P.Mean: Links and references that I need to add (2008-09-18). I often run across important links and references that I need to add to my webpages. I don't want to add an undocumented link or reference, though. I try to include a full description, including a summary or excerpt. This page will be where I "park" those undocumented links and references until I get around to documenting them.

5. P.Mean: New personal pages (created 2008-08-14). One issue at my old website was that I could not post personal information. That's a fair policy, and I'm not complaining. But now that I have my own website, I can add a few personal updates. The main focus of this website will still be statistics, but since I'm paying for this URL, I will add a few fun pages about myself. Since I'm a parent, I will be spending most of my time bragging about my little boy, Nicholas.

4. P.Mean: Should I abandon FrontPage? (created 2008-07-24). I've used various iterations of Microsoft FrontPage since the beginning of the StATS website (that site started in 1998, but the first "surviving" page dates from 1999). I like FrontPage, but I'm wondering if I should switch to an open source package.

3. P.Mean: Can I use some material from your website? (created 2008-07-18). Someone wrote in asking for permission to use some of the material on my old website, www.childrensmercy.org/stats. From December of 2007 through June of 2008, that was an easy thing to do. I had placed all of the content of my old website under an open source license. In particular, I used the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. Unfortunately, someone at the hospital raised a question about this and I may not have had the right, by myself, to declare that those web pages would be made available under such a liberal license.

2. P.Mean: Using Google to search through my website (created 2008-07-15). I want to set up a search function at this website, but I will have to learn a bit more about Linux servers first. In the meantime, it is very easy to search through my website (or any website) using Google.

1. P.Mean: How many files are in this new website? (created 2008-06-24). 1,192, I think. It's tricky to get an exact count on the number of pages on this website. I could count the number of files, but many of these files perform support operations and do not themselves display directly on the page. Other files, of course, are images used within a page.

Outside resources:

Rodriguez J. Email Address Munger/Email Address Encoder. Available at: http://www.addressmunger.com/  [Accessed March 4, 2009]. Excerpt: Email address munging is the act of using ASCII, JavaScript, and scrambling of letters in your email address in order to hide your email address from spam bots, spiders, and spoofers. Our anti junk email tool protects your email address and helps prevent spam by avoiding spam bots and email address harvesters. This tool allows you to munge and mask your email address by using ASCII, JavaScript, and/or image links.

Media Bloggers Association. Media Bloggers Association. Available at: http://www.mediabloggers.org/ [Accessed March 4, 2009]. Excerpt: The Media Bloggers Association is a nonpartisan non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of "blogging" or "citizen journalism" as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.

Mioplanet Technologies, Inc. Pixel Ruler: Your free virtual screen ruler. Available at: http://www.mioplanet.com/products/pixelruler/ [Accessed March 4, 2009]. Description: I try to keep my graphic images on my website to about 400 pixels in width. This free utility places a ruler on the screen so I can size my graphic images appropriately before exporting them to my website. URL: www.mioplanet.com/products/pixelruler

Creative Commons License All of the material above this paragraph is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2017-06-15. The material below this paragraph links to my old website, StATS. Although I wrote all of the material listed below, my ex-employer, Children's Mercy Hospital, has claimed copyright ownership of this material. The brief excerpts shown here are included under the fair use provisions of U.S. Copyright laws.

[[These links have been misplaced. I will add them back soon.]]

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