Week 3: A staff waiting for notes

Today I chose the CSS template that I expect will govern my site from here to the end of the course. It's called "An Ocean of Sky" -- a simple, functional template with one column and a nav bar at the top. My choice was governed by the nature of the project. A literary website should have a clean, uncluttered look, and my needs are not very complex; in particular, I don't need local navigation menus, sidebars, or other frills that take up a whole column of my nice whitespace. This particular template also gives me room for a picture between the nav bar and the content, and I think that something abstract and slim could give the site a very distinctive look. I haven't played yet with color or font, but I've figured out how to do that sort of thing easily. CSS is pretty cool.

In experimenting with "An Ocean of Sky," I got a couple giggles. The template's developer made a couple mistakes; he misspelled the word "navigation" in naming an element, and, having done it once, he was obliged to do it again every time he called that part of the code. He also forgot to make one of his nav bar headings into a link. Seeing developers make mistakes gives me the confidence I need to make brand-new mistakes of my own!

I've created five basically identical pages: News (my index), Verses, About Me, FAQ, and Contact. In the end, these pages will all be rather different. I expect News to have a simple blog, Verses to use the PHP script I mentioned in my last post, and About Me to have some multimedia; if I have time and can figure out how it works, I'm going to try to implement an automatic feedback form on the Contact page. If all goes as planned, I'll have some experience working with the bells and whistles I'll need when I'm developing web pages "for real!"

Poems as the wind blows

I haven't touched my site since the class meeting on Tuesday, but I've done some research into my idea about fetching a random poem whenever a page is refreshed. I knew that I'd have to write or adapt some kind of script for it, and I needed to find out whether I could do it without teaching myself PHP from scratch at the same time that I'm learning HTML, Dreamweaver, and the contents of two other LIS courses. Happily, it looks like I can. I started my search by using View Source on the page of Neil Gaiman's that inspired this idea in the first place, but I wasn't able to identify what part of the code he uses to randomize the page's content. So I turned to Google.

A little cursory Googling around revealed a number of useful script-support sites, and fortunately, there are a number of people out there who for various reasons want to do the kind of thing I'm doing. It seems that the best-practices solution is that I should create an array -- not a full-fledged database, to my relief -- and use PHP for my scripting. I found good code on StackOverflow.com, and by looking it over I understand the principles I'll be using. I'll have an array called $poems, or something similar, and I'll populate it from a text file using a command like "$poems = file('poems.txt', FILE_IGNORE_NEW_LINES | FILE_SKIP_EMPTY_LINES)". Then I'll use the command "echo $poems[mt_rand(0,count($poems)-1)]" to have the script select a random number and pick the array entry corresponding to that number. I understand every part of that from my days coding in BASIC except the command "echo," which I assume outputs the picked entry to the webpage.

This is still going to require a lot of experimenting. I don't even know whether I need to explicitly install PHP support on my site somehow, or whether browsers and/or servers all already know what [?php] means. But if I can pull this off, I'll feel really happy about that piece of my site.

LOL

I'm home from the semester's first blended session, and thanks to the class activities, my website is live! It's not much right now, admittedly. It's a picture of a kitten sleeping on a laptop, with the caption "i iz on teh interwobz" written below it. (This will change later in the semester.) But it represents the ability to draft a webpage and upload it to a host, and that is pretty cool. I still need to install Dreamweaver on my home computer, and then learn the differences between the CS3 software we used in class and the CS5 that I bought.

At this point in the course I'm a little worried about CSS trivializing the web design process. It seems like there are a number of free templates with good artistic and architectural design; I could probably use their combination of layout, font, color, and so on off the shelf without ever making an original decision. I'll have to be on guard against laziness and ready to edit whatever template I decide on to give it whatever flavor I decide to convey. And of course figuring out how to incorporate a blog and a database will be a challenge as well!

Week 2: Build a site.

But what kind of site to build? During week 1, the textbook delivered the shocking revelation that, since an HTML document is basically just a normal document with angle brackets, Notepad is a perfectly functional basic HTML editor. Following some examples from the book, I built my first webpage from scratch using Notepad. I incorporated all the basic tags from Chapter 2, and got them all working. There was nothing radically new to me here except for the !DOCTYPE bit -- I already knew how to use [a] and [img], and the rest of the tags were all less complicated than those -- but I'd never put them all together into a webpage without the help of a crappy Web interface like those of Geocities or Google Sites. There's still a lot to learn, but I'm feeling the exhilaration of seeing the first dividends of a new skill!

So I can build (very simple) webpages. But what will I put on them? I tutor students to pay the bills, but for the moment I don't want a Web presence for my business; that would make me look altogether too professional. I would rather create a site about a personal interest. The obvious choice, and the one I'll probably go with, is poetry. I play with verse here and there, and have written some stuff I want to put up on the Internet. The normal venue for publishing hobbyist creativity on the Web seems to be DeviantArt, but DA doesn't give you a lot of control over the presentation of your work. A self-built site, in theory, gives you as much control as you like.

A website about my poetry, of course, needs at least one page containing a poem, and I have some half-formed thoughts about that topic. Neil Gaiman's website has a feature that grabs a few random essays from some behind-the-scenes database whenever you refresh the page, and I like this serendipitous way of delivering creative content, even though it takes control away from both me and the user. It creates the sensation of hidden depths, as well as the aesthetic feeling of the evanescence of what you're looking at, both of which are entirely appropriate ways for poetry readers to engage with a poem. If I can figure out how to create this effect with databases and/or scripts, I'd like to try and replicate it with poems. Elsewhere on the site, I want a blog -- possibly as the main page, possibly not -- as a way to talk to whatever audience the site ends up drawing. I should put up a resume, too. As I keep learning about the tricks of the Web publishing trade, I'll keep an alert eye for which ones fall in line with this vision for my site!

Week 1: Dyeing to Design

Welcome to my course blog for the University of South Florida's LIS 5937, Web Design for Librarians!

In perusing this week's assigned websites, I especially enjoyed browsing the archives of webpagesthatsuck.com, a site whose wall of shame is likely to provide ample instruction (and winces) throughout this course. Among the sites they call out is relogik.com, which is rightly mocked for its use of nigh-illegible medium gray text on a light gray background. I followed a few of the links on their send-up of Relogik and arrived at a discussion of contrast on web pages, which in turn led me to a set of tools for developing pages that work for color-blind users.

It was at this point that I had my first oh-no moment of the course. The color-blindness simulation tools were undoubtedly well adapted for their intended purpose -- that is, showing designers without any color deficiency what their color scheme will look like to a color-blind person. Unfortunately, the tools weren't so useful to me, as I am protanomalous (or "red-weak") myself! So already, in the first week of the course, I've made a mental note that if I design color schemes that use a lot of reds, I ought to run them past someone with normal color vision. I've rarely had trouble using a website because of my protanomaly, but I've often played video games whose shades of red and green looked too similar for me to distinguish, and I wouldn't want to inflict an analogous experience on my hapless majority of users who are color-normal!