cleverhelp:

Massively Open Online Courses are the new vogue way to take control of your education and your career, and it’s the best thing. Higher education should be a right, but many of us can’t afford or can’t even access modern college courses. Anyone with conviction and a few extra hours a week can get themselves a college education from some of the best teachers in the world. You can even put finished courses on your resume. Just a few colleges that offer free online courses: MIT, Boston University, Dartmouth, Cornell, University of Tokyo, Harvard, Yale University, and the University of Geneva - and that’s barely scratching the surface.

Those are some of the most funded, most prestigiously staffed universities in the world. The education offered by them, for free, is at your fingers. Just because the world might hold degrees and the brick and mortar institutions of modern universities as a reward for the already privileged or the lucky doesn’t mean you don’t have the resources to learn. Throwing the exposition away, here are my favorite courses for writers available this fall semester:

• English Grammar and Style taught by University of Queensland’s Roslyn Petelin, Gabrielle O’Ryan, and Michael Lefcourt. It’s a basic writing course, taught by professors who understand English like the backs of their hands. 
  

• The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: Epic and Lyrictaught by Harvard’s Professor Gregory Nagy. Course on heroic story structure that walks you through the ancient Greek heroes and stories that set up the future of western literature. Breaks down the Epic and Lyric forms.

• The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours: Signs of the Hero in Epic and Iconography Part two of the course above, this time moving to the influence of visual heroic iconography. 

• Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World taught by Professor Eric Rabkin. Genre course that explores the two major fiction forms as a reflection of human society. Covers a lot of pop culture favorites. 

• Unbinding Prometheus taught by Eric Alan Weinstein through Open Learning. The class, starting in November, will explore the meaning of Percy Shelley’s work and the impact the man (who believed writing could free mankind from their shackles) has had on the world he left behind. 

• The Divine Comedy: Dante’s Journey to Freedom taught by many Georgetown professors, including Dante and Derrida: Face to Face author Frank Ambrosio. It looks frankly awesome, talking about the modern reader and Alighieri’s work, and the first sentence of the class description speaks for itself: Students will question for themselves the meaning of human freedom, responsibility and identity by reading and responding to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.

• Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative taught by Vanderbilt University’s Jay Clayton. This class is about Lord of the Rings Online. It’s not actively running, but you can access all the materials online. 

• Laura Ingalls Wilder: Exploring Her Work & Writing Life taught by Missouri State’s Pamela Smith Hill, an Ingalls Wilder scholar. Wilder’s Little House series has informed our perceptions of her era in North American history, but there’s more than meets the eye in her stories. Just like Shakespeare, there are more than a few controversies around authorship, and a lot to talk about in this course.

• How Writers Write Fiction taught by University of Iowa’s professor (and author of Things of the Hidden God) Christopher Merrill. The course presents a curated collection of short, intimate talks created by fifty authors of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays that you can’t catch anywhere else. Features weekly writing assignments.

• Poetry: What It Is, and How to Understand It taught by George Washington University’s Margaret Soltan. A class in modern poetry, the whys and hows, and a cultural learning class we’d recommend for anyone trying to broaden their artistic perspective.
  

EXTRA CREDIT: Important and interesting classes I would recommended.

• Understanding Violence taught by Professors Deb Houry and Pamela Scully.  Covers elements of biology, sociology, and psychology. You’ll study the biological and psychological causes of violence, and how violence is reported and portrayed in the media. Seems like an excellent research course for action writers.

• Social Entrepeneurship taught by Professors Kai Hockerts, Kristjan Jespersen, Ester Barinaga, Anirudh Agrawal, Sudhanshu Rai, and Robert Austin. Doesn’t just talk about how to use social media for your own benefit — the course is meant to break down how to use social media and community engagement for global change. 

• Comic Books and Graphic Novels taught by University of Colorado Boulder’s William Kuskin. Explores the medium at length. Has special class topics on Batman, Neil Gaiman, Pop Culture, Defining Art, and Gender. 

— Audrey Erin Redpath (@audreyredpath)

ettudis:

ettudis:

This tutorial will cover how to make themes with more than one column in which the posts are nested (aka. Grid theme), in particular, themes in which the columns are in only one specified width. 

I have not yet made a theme in which the column sizes change thus I do not how to do it, but the script are the same, you probably just need to add extra features to the script so perhaps you can figure it out on your own. 

Anyways, let’s get started. 

The Concept

We are going to use one div layer to wrap ALL the content, and then another div layer to wrap each post. Then, we use the CSS element, float:left; so that each post is stacked next to each other. The Masonry script will be used so that the post becomes nested. So we’re going to seperate this tutorial into three main ideas:

• The HTML: set-up
• The CSS: making things stack into columns
• The script: incorporating masonry to make it nester

The HTML

In my tutorial series, I mentioned there were two ways to set up the posts block, one with tables and another with div layers. However, in those lessons, I also mentioned to not put div layers around the post blocks (only inside) since it interrupts with the infinite scrolling script by cody sherman.

Well, scrap all that. It won’t matter since we’re not using the same infinite scrolling script. We’ll be working with div layers and you’ll need two. One will be outside the post block, to wrap around all posts, and the other, will be for each individual post (inside the post block). Similar to this…

<div id ="content">{block:Posts}

   
<div class="container"> 

{block:Text}
{block:Title}<h1>{Title}</h1>{/block:Title}        
{Body}
{/block:Text} ...

Please, please, PLEASE use your own wrapper (div layer) IDs.

The CSS

In the CSS, you want to make the content wrapper be big in accordance to the number of columns you want and the size of your columns. For example, you plan to have 400px wide posts (container wrapper), and want two columns, you would need at last 800px width for your content wrapper. Make sure you take into consideration, the margin and padding of your layers (ie. if you had 5px margins, your content wrapper should be about 820 or more,). Just trial and error until you get the right look! 

Next, you need to make sure your container wrapper is floated to the left:

.container{

float:left;

}

The Script

Next, you are going to incorporate the script so that it displays the way you want it to. 

First, you need to include to external script links (place codings anywhere between <head> and </head>. One link is to jquery and the other is to the masonry script. 

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://static.tumblr.com/d0qlne1/DiAl6ekb7/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>

<script src="https://static.tumblr.com/twte3d7/H8Glm663z/masonry.js"></script>

Then, you need to include the basic script required for the masonry:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(window).load(function () {
$('#content').masonry({
itemSelector : ".container",
},
function() { $('#content').masonry({ appendedContent: $(this) }); }
);
});
</script>

The important parts are bolded, replace with the names of your wrappers/div layers. 

Ta-da! You’re basically done. This all you need for masonry to work. Simple, eh? Though I think most people are familiar with multi-columns in combination with infinite scrolling, but the above code DOES NOT include infinite scrolling, so you will need to add in pagination codes (explained here). 

There are many other options, code that customizes the masonry, you may include (add after itemSelector : ‘.container’,) as well as other methods, effects that you can add to masonry, such as infinite scrolling which I will explain here. 

Masonry with Infinite Scrolling

First, you need to add a link to a masonry-specific infinite scrolling script. 

<script src="https://static.tumblr.com/twte3d7/qNulm663d/infinite.js"></script>

And so, we have the basic script:

<script type="text/javascript">
$(window).load(function () {
$('#content').masonry({
itemSelector : ".container",
},
function() { $('#content').masonry({ appendedContent: $(this) }); }
);
});
</script>

So, you need to add additional codes to render infinite scrolling:

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(window).load(function () {
 $('#content').masonry(),
$('.masonryWrap').infinitescroll({ 
itemSelector : ".container", 
 navSelector : "div.navigation",
 nextSelector : ".navigation a#next",
 bufferPx : 10000,
 extraScrollPx: 10000,
 loadingImg : "",
 loadingText : "",
 },
 function() { $('#content').masonry({ appendedContent: $(this) }); 
});
 });</script>

For some reason not specified on the site, it is necessary to include all those options (buffer, loading text and images, next page selectors) for infinite scrolling to work. As well, additional HTML (for the next/previous pagination codes) is needed:

<div class="navigation">
{block:Pagination} 
{block:NextPage}<p id="page_nav"><a style="float:right" href="{NextPage}" id="next">Older ?</a>{/block:NextPage}
{block:PreviousPage}<a style="float:left" href="{PreviousPage}">? Newer</a></p>{/block:PreviousPage}
{/block:Pagination}
</div>

But since we’re working with infinite scroll and do not want pages, we can just use CSS to hide the codes:

.tumblrAutoPager_page_info, .tumblrAutoPager_page_separator {display:none;}
#infscr-loading {display:none;}
.navigation {display:none!important;} 

Now, because everyone has different screen resolutions, people with bigger screens meet a problem. Sometimes, the content at first will not reach the bottom of the window on bigger screens, and since infinite scrolling relies on the whole scroll aspect, the next page content will not load (since no scrolling is in effect).

To prevent this, I add an extra div layer with no content inside the div layer…

<div id ="over"></div>

And specify a certain height in the CSS so that it will stretch the screen.

#over{
height:2000px!important;
position:absolute;
top:0px;
left:0px;
width: 100%;}

So in the end, you will have the following for your masonry with infinite scrolling codes:

• infinite scrolling script
• jquery script
• masonry script
• basic masonry initial codes (with infinite scrolling method and options)
• navigation HTML
• navigation CSS

The End

I think I’ve covered all the basics. If you have any questions, feel free to ask, though I did not develop this script nor am I too familiar with it, so I can’t guarantee thorough answers. My advice is to TRIAL AND ERROR! Good luck, and happy coding!

UPDATED WITH INFINITE SCROLL FIXES. I am so silly, I always make so many stupid small mistakes that really shouldn’t happen in the first place.

The reason why the codes weren’t working was because I forgot to include the blocks that renders the tumblr variables for the pagination (ex: {block:Pagination}, {block:NextPage} etc etc).

Without it, tumblr won’t read for the following pages, and thus, infinite scrolling won’t work because what the infinite scrolling script does is uploads the codes for the next page. *SMACKS SELF* That was silly.

pumpkinstileslatte:

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