Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, “FAIL.”
—Merlin Mann
Months ago, a reader asked me what software I use to create all the different blog posts, handouts, podcasts, lecture notes, and audio files for the website. It’s quite a long list, which could use some paring down in the next semester. I’ve broken it up into three bits: Website & Podcast, Slides and Handouts, and Other. I’ll finish off with some thoughts about where to go next with the blog, the podcasting, and slideshows.
Here’s the list, and what I use each piece for.
1. Website
1. WordPress for the website, with Podpress for integration with iTunes. About 20 plugins for different bits of functionality like printing posts and integrating 
into each post and search engine optimisation.
2. Apture for autolinks and auto content generation on the site.
3. Vimeo for hosting podcasts, because hosting them myself shags me straight in the wallet. It cost me nearly 300 euros one month for all the extra bandwidth. These podcasts are huge files, so it makes sense to host them somewhere else and stream them.
4. iShowU for making screencasts.
5. Profcast for making the podcasts, or if there’s no slideshow, Audio Hijack Pro for recording the talk.
2. Slides and Handouts
1. I use Keynote and Beamer for the presentations, depending on how mathematical the subject is. Never PowerPoint. I’m starting to look at 280slides.com though for producing quick presentations on the fly.
2. I made all of last year’s EC4333 handouts using Apple’s spreadsheet program, Numbers. They looked great, I’ll probably keep some of them in next semester’s iteration of the course. Examples of the handouts are here and here.
3. I use Mathematica for simulations and demonstrations of different models, also for some lecture notes, for example, all of Financial Economics, EC4024, had their handouts made in Mathematica (examples here and here).
I don’t really like the way they look though, so I might move the lecture notes over to for the coming semester.
4. for typesetting mathematical documents, lecture notes, slideshows, and articles. I might begin using this exclusively from now on, even though it looks pretty boring for the reader. There is a latex class built on Edward Tufte‘s visual schema I might try. We’ll see.
3. Other
I’m using a lot of Web 2.0 Applications to distribute the content I create. This is for several reasons. Either hosting them on my own site would be expensive, or I’d lose control of the versions of these things if I just let everyone download .pdfs, or I think the app adds something to the exposition, or I’m just messing around with the functionality and seeing what works. Whatever the reason, these are the apps I tend to use for editing/viewing and displaying content on the site.
1. Google docs for reading Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents people send to me.
2. Scribd to allow viewers of each document I put up to view them online as well as allowing me to keep download statistics on each document. My scribd page is here.
3. Vimeo, see above.
4. slideshare.net to allow viewers of the slide shows access to them without, again, doing horrible things to my wallet. My slideshare page is here.
5. flickr.com for photos, but I’ve never really used this. I put up an account to share charts and graphs, but IBM’s cool visualisation software seems to have beaten flickr on that score.
4. Moving forward with the site, lecture notes, and other content
I’ll try hard to emulate Terry Tao‘s style of lecture exposition in next semester’s classes, with comprehensive handouts written as blog posts, linked to textbook or online resources, and Mathematica demonstrations, or what have you. I’ll definitely use slideware for the 350+ EC4004, Economics for Business, but I’m not so sure about Economics of European Integration, EC4333. That one, I might just teach old school, and see what happens.
Next, I’ll do the podcasts again, on Vimeo, the hosting site. The handouts will be pdfs, most likely , and the mathematica demonstrations will be available on the site as well as the Wolfram website for their demonstrations.
If anybody has any suggestions on improving the content or the website, please let me know.
