June 20

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Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
or
A Cloud Chamber on the Mind

Wednesday June 20, 2007 7:00 am Lethbridge

It is +8 C with a high forecast of +29 C. Sunrise 5:23 Sunset 21:42 Hours of daylight: 16:19

A. Morning Musings

7:10 am

This is the first day of using my new XHTML web page with CSS formatting. At the same time I am changing the actual content to place more emphasis on my thoughts for the day. The first evidence of this is that I am no longer going to paste news headlines from the CBC and Australian web news sources. But I will begin the morning by checking these sources and occasionally making a general comment.

There is a breaking story saying that three NATO soldiers have been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. The regular occurrence of such stories is heartbreaking. I am impressed with the dedication of such soldiers in a mission that seems futile. Unless the Afghani people take much more responsibility for removing the Taliban and al-Qaeda from their country I feel the overall effort will fail.

This has been a fascinating hour. I started with the CBC web site and then became interested in a link called "Most Blogged" and began to wonder how they determined this. I quickly found the Technorati web site and quickly entered the public world of blogging. This can be a real time sink. I will return to this tomorrow.

B. Actual Learning Activities

8:05 am

I have two short-term goals in mind for this morning. I want to try attaching a W3C logo at the bottom of each page that satisfies their XHTML standards and I want to get some of the links working on the left side of this page. To work ...

Using Dreamweaver 8, I found no browser errors for this page. I also did a validity check and received a message saying "No errors or warnings found. [XHTML 1.0 transitional]".

I then went to the W3C validator service ( http://validator.w3.org/ ) and received a message indicating that this page was valid and that I could copy a few lines of code and paste them into my page and the W3C logo would appear on the page. Done. I then reran the validation check to see if the page would still pass the test. Yes.

8:20 am

Now to play around with the links on the left side of this page. Pasting a URL into a word to create a link is straightforward. I now have one for the Home page. But I also think that there are a few CSS commands that are relevant to this: something to do with "on mouse over" or something similar. Let's see if I can get on top of this. This took half an hour but I now have a new CSS rule:

#cell1 a:hover {
background-color: #00FF00;
}

This turns the background color to green when the cursor moves on top of the link. This is all I want to do at the moment. A great beginning to the day. And the page is still valid.

3:30 PM

We are back from a delightful birding drive in the nearby countryside. We began by stopping at a small slough near a feedlot just past the highway 3 turnoff to Vulcan. We were not disappointed. There were numerous shorebirds as well as some ducks. We then took a leisurely drive around Kehoe lake. Once again we saw numerous American Avocets, Black-necked Stilts, and Eared Grebes. The latter is a new lifer for us. The weather was superb: no wind, clear blue sky and a temperature around 27 C. Now to sift through the photos and see which are worth keeping. But first I need to recharge the camera's battery.

4:30 PM

Dale's work is never done. I now have this page embedded within my 2007 web site. That was relatively easy to do. But now I have to figure out the best way to add forward and back links to this page. One option would be to insert two small arrows on each page. Another option would be to add two links, very similar to my previous pages. Although the arrows are relatively standard options for web pages, I like the additional information in the links that say "Previous Page" and "Next Page".

5:30

Done. This still takes a little longer than it should, but I am beginning to get the hang of it.

Here is the web page for our June 20 birding trip.