Welcome to my class page!
This particular web site is all about trends and technologies that are emerging on and for the Internet. The teacher guides us through different ways of looking at things, different ways of thinking, and learning how to use the tools and trends that are occuring all over the WWW. Examples of a few trends happening in the now include RSS Feeds, wiki's, blogs, social networking, business networking, separation of format from content using external CSS, and personalization. Not just any website is using these trends, but the big guys are, too! From Yahoo to MSN to Facebook, these trends are becoming something to think about for small pages such as this one, too. After all, if you want to run with the big dogs, you have to learn from them first!
This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer 7 or Netscape Navigator 9.
These are the topics that we covered so far in this class. Click the links to learn about them!
- Links: The separation of format from content using external CSS sheets isn't for dumbies! It's a hard skill to learn, especially with each browser parsing your data differently. But it's definitely something that's very useful for every web developer to learn, and well worth their time to do so.
- Trends: This page goes into depth on three separate web trends that I find good to know about if you're making your own web site or one for a business: RSS Feeds, mobile web, and personalization.
- Mobile: There are two links on this page, one to a web page written in WML and another written in XHTML-MP and CSS. Both are languages meant for web surfing on mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDA's. There are a few mobile browsers they use, some able to use CSS sheets and some only plain text.
- Wiki: I made this wiki for my friends as a project for this class. One of the web trends I was most interested in was a wiki, but seeing as I know nothing about PHP or how to make pages editable by outsiders, I had to make one on a free wiki site, Wet Paint.
- Panorama: This project was probably the most fun and one of the easiest! Using ULead software and my Canon Powershot A70 digital camera, I made a panoramic view. Come to my back porch!
- Choice: We were allowed to choose any software we could download a trial of. I decided to try PY Software's 2D and 3D Animator and made a few things that I put on display here.
Overall Reflection
I loved doing all formatting with external CSS sheets, it makes everything so much easier! I learned that I also have much to learn in this aspect, but I do think I will be getting better the more I work with it. If I had more time and wanted to actually redesign this site, I would definitely add more graphics, including a header graphic. I think the most problems I had on one page was the panoramic page and trying to get that movie to show! I nearly tore my hair out, and now it's only sort of working but only in certain browswers. I'll take it, I guess. Firefox is my favorite browser and I'm glad it works there, but sad it doesn't in IE. Once again, if I had more time, I'd play around with the embed tag or other tags to get it to work.