Tough Class Today (3/10)

Today didn't go well.

We had to bump the discussion of Williams and Tollett, and the planned workshop on web design ideas because too few people had done that homework. Then the brief tour of Dreamweaver got ugly and people experienced about 6 different things that can go wrong. Things were slow at times, too fast and confusing at other moments. No one left class with a clear sense that they accomplished "real" work on the personal website.

I spent a couple hours tonight reflecting on the class, and have come to the following decision:

I'm going to shift the WIKI part back to the last portion of the class and move more personal website work into the middle. This will enable us to make good progress on our sites.

Don't feel too frustrated if you're lost. You poked around in Dreamweaver, tried a few things (links, modify a template, make new pages based on a template, change some colors in the stylesheet, etc.) And you got a general look through some key parts of the interface.

I do have Dreamweaver screencasts to help with each part of the interface, and with making key modifications to the templates. These will be helpful in the coming weeks.

Let's come to class with our work ready to go next Tuesday, pick up the pieces, and carry on!

We'll talk about Williams & Tollett, Krug, our draft website content, and our designs. We'll also put our content into 4 pages on the website and actually upload a "draft" personal website. Bring your feedback for your peers so they have something to work with as they revise their own content.

Blog Themes

You've been styling your blog with a theme you like. Hopefully, your theme is starting to "fit" with your blog topic. Hopefully, you're also adding new page elements to your blog and making some use of Blogger's "gadget" options. Now it's time to tell us what you're attempting here.

I'll go first. I took the minimal theme and went with black background and that bright orange color because I'm drawing on the logo for the primetime drama Criminal Minds. I styled the course website theme with that logo in mind, and named the style "Dr. Reid" as a clear gesture of acknowledgment. Consistency told me to run with it on the course blog.

The Label Cloud page element is something that implements a tag cloud-like aspect to the post labels feature in Blogger. Labels help us narrow down our reading when we want a specific set of posts. The blogroll makes it easy for us to find each other's blogs. The Pogue's Posts is a feed subcription to David Pogue's tech columns in the NY Times, fitting in a course like this. The Hangman game gadget fits for two reasons: it has writing and one must have some fun on a website. Haven't played hangman in a while, have you? Give it a go.

What's in your blog?

First Class

Good discussion, questions, and ideas on day one. While I don't expect folks "understand" much of what we started talking about, I do hope your interest is piqued.

Please post additional thoughts on the Wesch video as a comment to this post.

Books for Class (Amazon)

The books on order for the class are available in the campus bookstore, and there are a couple used copies of some of them. In a course like this one, it seems only fitting to consider places on the internet where course texts can be purchased.

Here are the books for class, a rough date when you'll NEED them, and the best (new/used) price available through Amazon (as of Friday, January 23).

• In the Beginning was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson (Required) - Needed Immediately - $8.50/$1.40
  
• Head First HTML, by Elizabeth Freeman & Eric Freeman (Required) - Needed by Week 3 - $26.39/$17.19
• Blogs, Wikis, MySpace, and More, by Terry Burrows (Recommended) - Helpful Immediately - $10.17/$8.74
• CSS: The Missing Manual, by David Sawyer McFarland (Recommended) - Helpful Almost Immediately - $23.09/$19.97
  

These books ordered new from Amazon are less than $70. Go used and the cost drops to less than $50. By only the required books, go used, and you're down for less than $20 in bound texts.

Do buy the Stephenson at the bookstore, unless you're going to order on January 27, with 2 day shipping. It's the cheapest book on the list, it's a good read, and we're starting the course with it.

Find better prices elsewhere? Share with a comment!

Label Cloud Implemented

I had been wanting to put a tag cloud on the course blog for a couple years. But Blogger doesn't have a cloud out of the box, and I never really took the time hunt down a custom-made widget. Then I found phydeaux3's Label Cloud javascript implementation. Three snips of code and Voila!

Laying the Foundation

I cleaned up the blog this afternoon. After thinking about a "look" for this year's course website, I settled on something based on a popular television drama. (It's too obvious, I'm sure.)

Instead of working in two different blog platforms for the 2009 course, we'll work solely in blogger for our individual and group blogging. We'll use this blog and the "team blog" feature to establish a group blog environment.

That's all for now.