Uh Oh!

Here I've been using blog space (and all my followers' [0] precious time) making cute entries about my DW frustrations. Imagine my surprise when I reviewed the MAT165 Blogging Goals (..contribute to the "collective intelligence"...)

Woops. Haven't done much of that.

So, first of all, for beginners like myself, two primary resources:

• Google your problem - search "Dreamweaver" plus the current source of frustration: "rollover", "positioning", "export to external css" 
• The most useful single site for me was Entheos (www.entheosweb.com), a commercial site with many free features and easy to understand tutorials. Oddly, the site is pretty lackluster in terms of its own visuals.

My Mid-term web project...

reminds me of when I was a kid and put together plastic models. They always turned out okay but a bit shabby, glue overflowing at the joints, decals on slightly crooked, the wheels wouldn't turn.

Well, got 'er done! On to the next...

Here's a clock I like:

Fried

Ever leave the burner on and a nice pan over it? I have to turn around and go back home sometimes just to check that I haven't done it. OCD? Nope, once in a while the damned burner is on. Sometimes I don't turn around. Ruined some good pans.
Now that same brain is trying to code.

What? No Followers?

Week 6 homework - trying to assemble the primary components of the assigned web project, and ready to tear some hair out.

Created a little logo - described in last post - now I can't use it because it's too weak visually to match any possible color scheme that would be appropriate to a business consulting site.

Did a nice rollover while Karl was talking two weeks ago - completely forgot how I did it, but it was different than using DW's Insert/Image Object/Rollover.

I could probably whip the basics of a site together pretty quickly, but it would be really lame. I'm not an artist, so my aesthetic sense is being challenged by my abilities. Should I just go with the mechanics and do a tinker-toy layout, or should I try for a professional look?

Tempting to steal a layout, strip it of content, and repopulate with the project text and appropriate images, but
THAT WOULD BE CHEATING!

Tempting, though.

I Am a Photoshop Idiot

I'm not a read-the-manual type (am I being redundant?). Pull the device out of its packing, or load up the software, and let 'er rip. When I have a question, I Google the issue and proceed.

Photoshop, though, whew! When you hit a wall in Photoshop, the fix always depends on learning the basics. It's like trying to design a new circuit without having learned Ohm's Law.

My current Web Design class project requires designing a logo. I wanted two words to intersect, one vertical, one horizontal, on a common letter, with some drop-shadow and other text features. I wanted it all in a diamond-shaped enclosure with a subtle color background. I finally gave up and used GIMP because it has preloaded logo styles. Then I created each letter as a separate file and tried to copy and paste into a Word doc. The copy command wouldn't work until I discovered "right-click/edit/copy visible". Then I laboriously pasted each letter into Word and fixed my alignment and used the Snipping Tool to create an image I could reopen in GIMP so I could add a background color. Since I don't know how to do that, I created a layer and had to use the damned paintbrush. With the right opacity, the result was passable (for a sixth-grader).

Holy crap!

The basic Blog design options available are: Template, Background, Adjust Widths, and Layout.

I tried several templates before settling on the one I employed initially, and then added a background. It’s a mix-and-match puzzle, as many templates and backgrounds don’t go well together, and the color choices are important here as well. Also, changing the background color can render text unreadable if the background and text colors are too similar.

When I experimented with adjusting widths I set the right sidebar to minimum and found that that caused text to wrap one word to a row, which rendered it fairly incomprehensible.

I tried using the Edit HTML feature to edit my template. My thought was to fetch an image from my wife’s website and use it as a background, but I couldn’t make it work.

The Blogger Template Designer Advanced Features is mainly a control panel for various color schemes – Tabs Background, Footer, Text, Links, etc. There’s also an Add CSS feature that allows you to customize the appearance of your blog. I followed the directions for changing the background image and this time it worked, but the background was incompatible with the choices I already had made so I didn’t keep it – it was gratifying to see it work though!

I added a single Gadget called "Books & Stuff".

Finally, in the New Post/Compose window, standard text document choices are available, including font; font color and size; bold, italic, underline; text bg color; import image; insert link; etc. The font selection was limited and I'm not clear how one could add to it but it must be fairly simple (importing the desired fonts and adding to HTML).

For some reason the "text background color" did not take - it was probably overridden by the Template Backgound.

The main problem I have is that the "Page" that I created, "East Coker - definitions" is now also covered by the CSS, and it includes links like "Home" that don't function.

Blog Topic #5: What is Usability?

It's amazing how many sites there are that are frustrating to the end user - even (or especially, since they are often more complex) sites owned by major corporations. It seems like every few days I'll tell my wife, "this site is really retarded." Most of the time it's a matter of a link simply not doing what it syas it's supposed to do, or a failure to function within my favorite browser (Opera).

Often it's something as sample as an inability to respond to the "Back" button, especially after failing to launch a new page when you click on a URL. Other times it's the bandwidth-hog Flash ads that have very small light-gray "skip ad" buttons. But mostly it's a poorly organized structure that makes the site difficult to navigate.

I have followed Surfline for years now, and have watched them grapple with adding features and complexity while trying to maintain navigability. I think that overall they have done a great job, primarily in that they:

• allow me to personalize my experience by saving pages I visit most and offering them in a conveniently placed menu
• allow me to customize my preferences for locations I want to monitor (surf reports with live video feeds as well as surf forecasts)
• allow me to have multiple live-video feeds from as many as four surf locations all on one screen