Beyond School

More transparency as I learn what I’m sure to many of you is basic, using Ian Lloyd’s book from Sitepoint Press. (And I wonder if I’m going to kick myself for doing this, rather than putting this energy into simply learning Dreamweaver, which was installed on my new MacBook yesterday. It doesn’t hurt to know standards-based XHTML and CSS, I guess.)

Day 3/Chapter 4: Made the “feature” photo float in-line with CSS, added a “navigation container” from the wizard Ian Lloyd made, tweaked some padding and formatting, and changed a bit of wording. I especially like the Kurt Vonnegut quote from “Man Without a Country” added to the bottom of the page:

“The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”

–maybe that should be part of the tagline?

Anyway, here’s the homepage as it evolved over the last 3 days:

Day 1 (end of Ch. 2):
Day 2 (end of Ch. 3):
Day 3 (end of Ch. 4):
And here’s the bottom half of the hompage (I just love turtblu’s picture from Flickr):

And the very bottom, with the Vonnegut blockquote:

What’s nice, too, about this bit of fun is that it serves as proof that I’ve learned this stuff - without having to pay a school to give me a piece of paper “certifying” my qualifications. Another empowerment - beyond the academy (sorry, but grad school made me laugh so often) - brought to you by web 2.0.

Unless the institution finds ways to invalidate the obvious by requiring me to cough up money for that piece of paper, anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised.

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My last post had images of my websites-in-evolution from the middle of Chapter 3 of Lloyd’s excellent book. I just finished working through the last 22 pages of that chapter (to page 111), and this is how two of the pages look now (again, clicking on the pictures will open larger images in a new window):

Home Page:

Contact Page:

Keep in mind this is after only two hands-on chapters (Chapter 1 is introductory and “setting up” type stuff), with nine chapters left to go.

I wonder where it will all end up.

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As I mentioned in my last post, I’m learning XHTML and CSS with the help of a lovely, fat, easy to read book.

For the heck of it, I’m going to throw screenshots of the websites I’m creating as I learn. It will serve as an archive of the steps along the way. (The book’s approach is to have you build an example website already chosen by the author, but I figured I’d instead design a website for the “Community Service 2.0 / Year of Global Cooling / Concerts for Cooling” project I’m planning.)

So here’s what the book has helped me do by the middle of Chapter 3 (page 81), using simple XHTML and beginning to plunge into CSS. If you click on the photos, you’ll see larger versions –

The Home Page 2 and 3 (bottom half):

The Contact Us page:

The rest of Chapter 3 promises to add background color, more fine-grained styling options, and such. Stay tuned, if you want to see how quickly you can also learn this stuff. I’m finding it fun and, in a weird way, peaceful - kind of like how I imagine people feel when knitting or something.

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In case any of you out there are edtech geeks with a hankering to learn XHTML and CSS to build your own (or modify other) websites, I’m working through Ian Lloyd’s Build Your Own Website the Right Way - Using HTML and CSS (Sitepoint Press). I highly recommend it. It’s easy, it’s got a great support forum and website, and they offer discounts on other books they publish on Java, advanced CSS, php, mysql databases, and all the rest.

I’m loving it. If you think it’s hard, Lloyd’s book will show you you’re wrong. And if you buy it from the website, I think you get a discount on the Amazon price.

Just FYI.

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I’m falling more and more in love with Ning. When you embed videos posted on a public Ning, the Ning Media Player links back to your Ning (unfortunately, the Ning I set up for the “Year of Global Cooling” project is private, so I can’t embed anything from it–feel free to join if you think you can bring students in). So I want to see how it looks. I uploaded a tutorial I made on Screencast-o-matic that introduces Mac OS X to our students. “System Preferences,” specifically. It’s for an Apple Schools Asia Ning I’ve started. And notice the nifty logo you can personalize your Ning media player with.

Update: Wow, Ning, I’m impressed! And a tip to other Ning users thinking about using Screencast-o-matic on Ning: Ning doesn’t allow iframes embeds, so you have to download the SOM file, which is converted to .mov format, and then upload that .mov file to the Ning video page. Be careful about the 100mb file-size limit on Ning. Go over 10 minutes at 800 X 600, and you’re probably too big.

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