Web Spiders

Question: Is anyone aware of a source for recorded public domain music on campus that we can use for a project?

Answers:

*Here is what Vanderbilt is offering students:
Free Music Deal with Ruckus Near — Vanderbilt has a letter of intent on a deal with Ruckus and we’re in final negotiations to offer free music to students. This offer is planned as an addition to the current offering of VUmix at Vanderbilt. 

* Note that tunes acquired through Ruckus do not have public performance rights.

*You might check the various Creative Commons sites to see if they have anything that is appropriately licensed. There are quite a few of these popping up.

* If you run a search on “podsafe music” you’ll find sites that provide music offered under the Creative Commons license.  This kind of music is often used in podcasts, thus the term “podsafe.”

* It’s not on-campus, but there’s a lot of public domain stuff here: 

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%2Fmetadata%2Flicenseurl%3Ahttp*publicdomain*

*I’m not sure what you want when you request “public domain music?”  Even if the copyright has expired on a composition, there still can be performance rights to a piece. 

There are a multitude of services that will sell, for a nominal fee, music for use in web, audio or video productions.  I think this is what you might be looking for.

Do a Google search on “Buy out music” or “Needle drop music” for a listing of royalty free music vendors. 

*Music at Magnatune.com and music.podshow.com may be used royalty free if the use is in a podcast (which might be loosely defined). Check the conditions of use at both sites. Another source is garageband.com

Question: 

I am in the process of making a new Web site for my student organization. I have run into some CSS troubles on one page. The page has valid CSS 2.1 and looks fine on any standards-compliant browser, but the layout gets mangled in Internet Explorer 7. The top/bottom margins in the main area are narrower than expected, and some of the photos are not lined up with the others.  This has been quite frustrating to me, and I would really appreciate if anyone can help me with the CSS.

Answers:

• IE handles margins and padding differently. One of the keys to using CSS successfully is understanding the CSS Box Model and making your site look the same in all browsers.

  This article explains how IE renders things differently:

  http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200612/internet_explorer_and_the_c

  ss_box_model/

  You can also just google CSS Box Model, CSS quirks, CSS IE … there’s a lot of information out there on ways to work with the browser differences.  (I prefer having a separate stylesheet for IE and call it using a conditional statement – #3 on the link above explains how to do this – instead of putting hacks inside my stylesheets).

• 
  

  IE is an abomination. I’m sure the next version of Windows will fix everything, but until then..

  I tend to start with a css sheet that “resets” the margins and whatnot in the various browsers. Eric Meyer has a good one:

  http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/15/resetting-again/

  I’m also a fan of css frameworks like the 960 Grid System:

  http://960.gs/

• 
  

  I fixed the issue. It turns out that I had a comment above the DOCTYPE declaration, which kicked IE7 from standards mode into quirks mode and thus giving me the layout problems.

Sorry for a lengthy message, but this information may be useful those of you who support or may need to support payment processing:

Areas accepting payments for goods or services should be aware that authorization to establish a banking arrangement (including accepting payment methods such as credit cards and other third party payment acceptance methods) can only be authorized by the Vice Chancellor for Administration and Chief Financial Officer (Lauren Brisky) or the Vice Chancellor for Investments (Matthew Wright) or their designee.  This specific authority is granted by the Board of Trust (see the Vanderbilt University Authorization for the Signing of Contracts and Other Documents; http://www.vanderbilt.edu/compliance/authority_signing.pdf).  PayPal (and similar methods) is not an authorized payment acceptance mechanism for any Vanderbilt department, clinic, or operating area.

If an area needs to accept credit cards, a request to apply to be a merchant should be directed to either Merchant Accounts Management (university central departments contact Anna Letcher) or the Department of Finance (medical center departments contact Dana Walker.)  Once a valid business need has been established, the application for a merchant account will be forwarded to Vanderbilt’s credit card processor.

There are no centrally-supported payment processing solutions at this time.

All credit card processing (including internet-based payments) must comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Additionally, payment applications which store, transmit, or process credit card information are subject to the Payment Application Data Security Standards (PA DSS).  These are industry standards and require all credit card merchants to comply with data security standards to protect cardholder account information.  All inquiries regarding PCI Compliance should be directed to Anna Letcher.

Please feel free to share this information with others in your area.  I am happy to try to assist with any questions regarding credit card merchant accounts or PCI DSS/PA DSS.

According to Wikipedia (we can discuss credibility at some other time) a mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. There are many kinds of mashups and a short tutorial at Programmable Web presents the basics of creating mashups.

Gill Murrey at a Spiders’ Meeting in 2006 gave a demo of creating a mashup using Google Maps. This seems to be a very common use of mashups and Google Maps. To create a Google Map mashup you need to use their API the details can be found at, http://www.google.com/apis/maps/. From my searching the most complete example of a Google mashup is Stanford University’s campus map. I find this map very complex, hard to read and not very attractive. Another example of a mashup is a list of university podcasts around the world. Again I have a problem that you need to know where what you are looking is before you can find it.

Programmable Web has list of Google map mashups with examples that vary in quality. The ones I tend to like the best use mouse overs on the ballons so you know what each of the little ballons represents without having to click on it.

Given problems such as the maps not being current when you include the satellite view I’m not sure that Google map mashups are ready for prime time. There are definitely cool uses of this technology. Besides Gill is anyone using this on campus?