Previous Today's Special Items
Items in chronological order
Introducing the Client
Project: A BETA version due to be posted by Monday, December 10.
In class 11/14, go
to Talk City for a chat session.
The events of September 11th have produced the most intense feelings of national community that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. What role has the media (television, radio, the Internet, etc.) played in your own experience of this heightened sense of community? Has the media served us wel? Is "community" the right word?
The "Glocalization
Project" assignment is due. Please read it and the companion
page, "Defining Glocalization."
Please e-mail me any questions
or ideas you may have about this assignment. I will send out further instructions
via the class alias.
Please take a look
at the revised class schedule. The Glocalization
Project is due to be posted to the Web by Wednesday, November 21,
and the Client Project by Monday, December 10. More details
about logistics can be found on the schedule, and will also be forthcoming.
Please e-mail me with any questions.
Check the workshop
schedule to see which Personal Home Sites we'll be discussing on Wednesday,
November 7.
Please read the guidelines
for critiquing before responding to your colleagues' work.
From Wired
magazine <http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47841,00.html>
"Spooked by anthrax in the Capitol, public officials and opinion makers are scrambling to figure out how to keep the government running if Congress can't physically convene. Among the options being considered: having senators and representatives gather online, in "an electronic Congress." The idea, proposed by the Democratic Leadership Council -- the centrist group once headed by Bill Clinton -- is finding sympathetic ears in both parties. But don't expect lawmakers to begin voting on their laptops any time soon, policy analysts caution. In an online newsletter article entitled "Legislating By Any Means Necessary," the DLC asserted that a website "could easily be built" that would allow congress members and their staffs to debate, draft legislation and vote over the Internet."
I knew parts of Bev's
Web site--with its use of strong-bordered tables and cell background
colors--reminded me of something, which complicated my initial impulse
to advise making the table transparent by setting the table borders to
zero. Check out the work
of artist Piet Mondrian at art.com, especially the painting, "Neo-Plasticisme,"
on the second page. You can read a
little bit about Mondrian on the web. Is this a new style, Bev?
Here are a couple
of links to sites that I mentioned during class on 10/24:
- Adobe's online PDF converter (you get five free conversions if you register)
- The GIF and JPEG Cruncher from Spinwave
You can increase your
site's chance of turning up in Web searches by using keywords and metatags.
The metatag
page at webdeveloper.com provides much more information. In Dreamweaver,
you can enter and edit keywords by choosing "Insert" > "Head
tags."
Check out the free
workshops available on campus from ITSS in a variety of sofware and
techniques, including Dreamweaver, Cascading Style Sheets, etc. Enrollment
is limited so you need to register.
We used the examples
of botanical
drawings and Henry Beck's 1932 map
of the London Underground to discuss the concept of functional
abstraction, in response to Jakob Nielsen's comment that the Web should
be "better than reality" (157)
To begin our Dreamweaver
exercise this evening,
- please open up Netscape, Word and Dreamweaver on your computer.
- On your Zip disk (or floppy), create a new folder using your first and last name initials followed by "...dream"--for example, <csdream>. We'll use this folder for to keep our materials for learning Dreamweaver.
- Use the following links to find search engines to locate a picture on the Web of a favorite (or at least memorable or emblematic) food of your childhood (or, alternately, a favorite food of your crowd growing up).
Amy Jo Kim offers
a guide to community-building
tools and services, many of them free, including discussion lists
and threaded message boards.
Introducing the Audience
Profiles and Scenarios assginment. This piece of writing will be due
in class on Wednesday, September 27th.
We used these sample
homepages in class on Wednesday, September 20.
Introducing the Personal
Home Site Project.