Homework: Internet Communication

In your next lesson, you are going to begin working with WordPress.org, the self-hosted alternative to the WordPress.com platform we’ve been working in up until this point. We will be using Instant WordPress (or InstantWP) to develop a complete website locally, which allows us to work on our creation thoroughly before publishing it online for the masses to access. This is preferable to what we used to to in the past, displaying an “Under Construction” home page when anybody stumbled upon our website before it was fully ready for prime time.


The site of such a page these days is considered tacky and unprofessional (the same is true of the old “hit counter” that seemed to be included on the bottom of every home page of every website back in the 90’s.


Before diving into this next stage of our lessons, it is important that you have a basic understanding of how data is generated, understood, and transferred from point to point with modern computers. Simply put, the Internet (or World Wide Web) is just the connection of multiple local area networks (LAN) in order to create a single wide area network (WAN) we call the Internet, the Web, or the Cloud. However, having a bit more knowledge about the technology and processes that make this system the powerful resource the entire world now depends on will help you better understand what’s really going on when you input or output data with your computer and transfer it between devices on your home, cellular, or broadband Internet connection.

Step One

The first part of your homework assignment is to watch the following YouTube videos and take notes regarding any points you deem to be important. Those notes should be published in a new post on your website titled “Notes: Internet Communication”. The first video embed is actually a playlist of multiple videos created by Code.org. For your homework, you only need to watch the first two videos. Future homework assignments may be based on some of the remaining videos in that playlist.

The CS50 video below is Lecture 0 (Introduction) of Harvard’s Computer Science course. You will only need to know what is covered in the first 16:05 of the video, but you may wish to watch the entire video if you find it interesting.

Step Two

is to answer the following two questions at the end of your notes post.

  1. In one of the code.org videos, the presenter stated that there are 1,000 Kilobytes (KB) in a Megabyte (MG), 1,000 Megabytes (MB)  in a Gigabyte (GB), etc. This is technically incorrect; and it has even caused some uproar in the past because consumers were claiming false advertisement when looking to purchase hard drives in the store and the packaging cited incorrect storage capacities. Based on the information in the CS50 video (and any additional research you may resort to), why is her statement incorrect, and what is the correct ratio between Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes, Gigabytes, etc.?
  2. The CS50 video discusses how colors can be represented using Unicode or ASCII. As far as web development is concerned, what do you believe the advantages are when you design a website using those codes to represent the various shades of colors you wish to display rather than simply saying “red”, “green”, “blue”, “yellow”, etc.

Step Three

This step should have already been done by now. Review the video I linked to in that Skype chat message I sent previously and follow the steps provided to successfully run Instant WordPress on your Mac systems. This tool will be a necessary resource in our next lesson this Wednesday at 8:30pm EST.

As usual, shoot me a text via Skype if you have any issues with your homework assignment and I will get back to you as soon as I can. Alternatively, you could practice using the Comment area for this post to discuss the assignment and I will be sure to respond as soon as possible.


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