Beyond School

Update on Apress. Predictable: Apress marketers of some sort came to my post giving their book (Beginning PHP and MySQL 5, 2d Ed., by W. Jason Gilmore), forum, customer service, and company a D-. [Update: I assume this because the referral was a search on Tecnhorati for "Apress book" tags, and because the next paragraph happened on the same day.]

They went to the forum and deleted the spam that had accumulated down its first ten rows or so of entries. Nice cosmetic change, as easy as zipping up after someone points out your fly is down. At least they left the posts labeled, “If you’re not going to moderate these forums….” It must have been tempting to delete that too.

But what about the customer posts in those forums, most that I saw unanswered for months? How about the emails rejected as spam, after the Apress authors invite them in their expensive books?

Apress, come on. Don’t just window-dress. Problem-solve. Serve your customer. Or at least communicate with him.

If you can take the time to delete the spam from your forum, can you find a minute to answer your customers there too? Or at least explain?

If you can take the time to visit my blog - twice or three times, my Sitemeter told me - and read the post with the “D-” rating, can you take the time to respond to it as well? You’re a tech publishing house, so you probably know that on blogs, that “comment” thingy is a place to click and communicate. You’re invited.

If not, give me a refund on that $50, 1,000-page book that doesn’t live up to its promise. So I can reinvest it at Sitepoint, which does communicate with its customers, answer their forum posts, and does not make false “for novices” claims on their books.

So, Apress, for ruining my summer vacation, Your New Grade: F.

The continuing saga: I worked my way through the Sitepoint book on XHTML and CSS for beginners, but stopped before the Blogger template-hacking chapter. Why? Some of the very helpful people on the Sitepoint forums answered my noob questions about the best tools to use when writing and editing HTML and CSS mark-up. I’d asked about the Firefox Web Developer add-on, and why I couldn’t just use it to create the .html and .css files. It seemed so powerful (but warning: if you toggle the Code View to align on a different edge of your browser, you’ll lose all unsaved edits - I discovered this after three hours creating forms for the Global Cooling Concerts / “Community Service 2.0″ campaign).

Anyway, the Sitepoint gurus kept saying the word “Dreamweaver.” I figured I’d had enough of manually coding on TextEdit to get the gist, and to fire up my Dreamweaver 8 and see what I could learn.

I learned these things, among others:

• The Dreamweaver “getting started” help manual was adequate to teach me how to design websites using tables for the layout. But, since this is bad practice both in terms of load-time (more code) and accessibility (tables don’t help the visually impaired who rely on browser readers), I went to the “Creating Websites Using Tables” tutorial on Dreamweaver’s help, and it was a poorly done tutorial indeed. It said, “Enter your site’s content in the same way you did using the Tables Layout.” In reality, the two processes are considerably different, and not that intuitive. It took me two or three hours of trial and error to figure out the ropes, but I did.
• Dreamweaver is dead powerful. It took me two hours to build the same site I spent days on using the hand-coding on TextEdit method. Want to insert a Flash video? No need to write the code. Just drag and drop it into the cell or layer you created for it, and Dreamweaver writes the code for you. One example among many.
• Absolute positioning versus “relative” and “floating” positioning: I’m still trying to get my head around this. It’s important because it dictates whether the layout of your page “expands” when you “ctrl/apple +” to increase the font size on Firefox - essential for projecting websites in the classroom - or whether the text “spills out” of its containing cell on the webpage layout.

So now it’s time to stop the tutorials, and design some websites from scratch for real use. My two pet ideas: a “Jazz in Seoul” website (free drinks and no cover fee at the jazz clubs, anyone?), and the global cooling project website. * That’ll be “hobbyist” work for the next week or two.

Because I have a more pressing issue: learning PHP and MySQL databases. I just sent an email to W. Jason Gilmore, the author of the 952-page Beginning PHP and MySQL: From Novice to Professional, 2d Ed. - he encourages his readers to contact him with questions and comments - warning him that I’m still covered with noobie amniotic fluid from XHTML and CSS, but intend to learn enough PHP and MySQL to be able to administer Moodle and Wordpress MU. My goal is to work through his book in two weeks. It’s ironic, though, that I’m doing this while at the same time veering toward dropping Moodle and Wordpress MU from our school’s edtech menu in August. Using Ning to replace both of these is very tempting - I’m running an AP Lit Summer Reading Ning with my students right now, and loving how “un-schooly” - and low maintenance - it is compared to Moodle and Wordpress MU. No back-ups, no headaches with servers and upgrades and crons and php hacks, etc. If anybody out there has an argument against using Ning instead of Moodle and Wordpress MU - Jeff Utecht, I’d love to hear your point of view on this, since I blame you entirely for all this summer homework - I’d love to hear it. I know that I don’t know the answer here, so I’m all ears.

After that, I’ve got an AP Lit workshop online through UCLA extension - five weeks’ worth, which is so much better than a one-week in-house workshop for learning in depth - that starts on July 19. But I hope to learn Java at the same time. It’s summer vacation, after all. Free to learn instead of teach. I’ve already traveled so much it seems a bit old. And as my Quote-a-Day widget taught me, a closing quote by George Bernard Shaw: “A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”

And to that I would add: People who warn us not to work too much don’t know what it is to love your work.

–

*I know I’m silent on the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project lately, but it’s because I’m working on doing it with my students so much that there’s no point in talking about it - and no time. If you want to work with us - or, better put, point your students this way and let them connect with 18 students in Seoul who are already planning videos, concerts, websites, and logos, request an invitation on the members-only Global Cooling Collective. But don’t join just for the sake of joining another Ning, please! This is a project - I actually prefer the word “campaign” for this one - not a network. Interesting etymology: “Projects” are literally “thrown forward,” implying action. “Networks,” on the other hand, imply static “hanging.” So those who want to do instead of more talking about connecting and connecting to talk more are welcome to join. In fact, if you can’t think of any students you know who could run with this idea, hold off on joining. It’s really a project for students, and adults are not that necessary, beyond spreading the word to create the opportunity for students to take over. And if I sound like a wet rag about all the edublogging talk in the last month or two, well . . . somebody needs to be the gadfly.

Here’s day 4, working through Chapter 5 of Ian Lloyd’s XHTML and CSS book. It got confusing today which, since it forced me to step back and review, was good.

Added: background picture to navigation box, header background picture, “world-changing students” feature page.

I found a Firefox add-on called “Screen Grab!” which captures entire pages, not just windows, so I don’t have to cut up the pages anymore

Here’s the home page, which still needs an improved color design, and will hopefully get it later. (I really want to get students to do this so they have a real-world web-design project under their belts, with credit. I’ll probably leave it this boring and ugly and invite Any Teen in the Flat World to flex their skills with a make-over.)

And here’s the new “World-Changing Students” feature page, for Those Who, I Pray, Get Involved. It features some of my Korean students.

So that’s the end of Chapter 5 - 222 pages. Chapter 6 is Tables, Chapter 7 is forms, Chapter 8 is finding a good host, and Chapter 9? It looks very interesting: how to hack Blogger’s blog template to add a blog to your website. Chapter 10 is “Pimping Your Site” with free stuff, and Chapter 11 says, in essence, “Now go learn Java, php, mysql.”

I hope to, before summer break is over. But I must admit I have a bit of a headache, backache, neck- and shoulderache.

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.

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.