Friday, April 1, 2011 Lethbridge

6:00 am Birding

A check of a web tracking service indicates that the amazon.ca order of books left Calgary early this morning, so I should receive them later today. There are 4 books on birding that I am looking forward to using to help me identify gulls, warblers, and raptors (2).

7:00 am Technology

I have finished reading and following the steps for chapter 4 from the DW-CIB book. All of these activities are carried out within DW CS5. It is a good introduction to using DW to modifying CSS files. The emphasis within the Design workspace is on changing appearance rather than on code. Excellent!

The next chapter is on creating a page layout, which is what I will be doing when I redesign this website.

Note: I have added a bit of green text to the time heading. The idea is to tag some sections of web page with a label that can be linked to an index page. There will be an overview index page that lists all of the possible tags and then a separate index page for each tag. This should permit one to quickly find all the pages where a particular topic was described.

But I also want the viewer to easily move sequentially forward and back to successive entries. Thus each tagged section should end with links to previous and next sections for that topic.

Previous      Next

However I do not know if there is a way to have the code for these two links do the actual searching for where the the appropriate tags are located. At the moment it looks like I will have to do this manually, which is a bit of a pain.

And it is worth mentioning that I am still using DW CS3 to create this page. But this has been a good beginning to the day.

Now it is time for my second cup.

10:00 am Technology

I want to capture a few points from my earlier reading of the first five chapters of DW-CIB.

The Property Inspector toolbar adjusts the parameters depending upon what elements have been selected:

• HTML button - quickly assign some basic HTML codes and formatting
• CSS button - quickly access CSS commands for formatting
• image - select image to access image properties
• table - select table to access table properties.

This should be the first place I look when editing or setting up the formatting on a web page. But I should use the HTML button sparingly. It may give a quick solution to some formatting problem but there is likely a "better" (i.e. more efficient in the long run) approach using CSS.

Clicking on an image or table and then reviewing the options in the Property Inspector is not an automatic reflex for me at the moment. But I will endeavor to make sure it is in the future.

CSS class and id selectors are a great way to apply formatting commands to a specific collection of elements. One gives the formatting commands by specifying the name of the class with a period as the first character and then including the formatting commands within parentheses. One then specifies where the class is located in the HTML code. An id selector works the same way as a class selector except the name begins with a # symbol instead of a period. There should only be one occurrence of the id within a web page. This is an approach that I should also use a lot in order to make it second nature.

DW CS5 provides 16 different CSS layouts. This should be the first place to look when creating a page - there may be a format that is already to use!

When inserting images into a web page the actual image size will override the place holder values.

Web standards recommend that the <empty> attribute should be assigned to any graphic that is used for decorative or spacing purposes.

Here is a suggested (recommended!) list of the steps one should follow in creating a website.

• Answer (be very clear) the following 3 questions:
  • what is the purpose of the website?
  • who will see it?
  • how do they get to the website (browser, high-speed internet, cell phone, iPad)?
    
    
• Create a set of thumbnails that provide a map of the types of pages in the website and show the navigation links connecting them.
  
  
• Create a list of all the components that will appear on each page.
  
  
• Sketch a wireframe for each type of page showing the arrangement of the components.

I have never actually done this! I usually just have a idea and then begin creating the page and making adjustments as I go along. This time I will follow these steps as I begin to revise this website.

However before I actually begin using DW to implement these ideas, I want to carefully go through the activities outlined in chapters 4 -7. This will help build the skills I will need shortly.

11:15 am Birding

The books have arrived from amazon.ca. Here is a list of the titles:

• Gulls of the Americas (2007) Steve N. G. Howell & Jon Dunn.
• Warblers (1997) Jon Dunn & Kimball Garrett
• Hawks from Every Angle (2005) Jerry Liguori
• Hawks at a Distance (2011) Jerry Liguori

3:30 PM

For lunch we tried out a new eating place in Lethbridge called Five Guys Burgers and Fries (an American franchise). The burgers were fine but an app on my iPhone indicated that the meal was 1000 calories.

On the way home we drove by Henderson Lake to see if the ice was off it. There was a small amount of open water in a couple of places but generally speaking the lake is still ice bound. The Oldman River is now open. The waterfowl should begin arriving in the next few days.

We then decided to do a coulee walk to burn up a few calories so we could have a dinner. The weather was beginning to cool off but there was no sign of the snow that is forecast for this evening. We had binoculars with us but failed to see any birds (or porcupines).

9:10 PM Technology

I have added a link on the previous page to the first Birding section on this page using the id attribute and it works just fine.

I am still uncertain about the best way to handle this type of navigation throughout the website. Thus I could also add forward and back arrow links at the end of each activity section to allow one to follow a particular thread sequentially. My concern is one of easily getting lost. It may be a bit more cumbersome to have the viewer always return to an index and then click on the next link in the index to follow the thread, but at least one would always have a sense of where they were and how they got there. Perhaps the solution is to make both approaches available and let the viewer use whatever strategy they wish.

10:00 PM History

I have found time to read one more chapter from "The Wayfinders" by Wade Davis. This chapter described an indiginous culture at the headwaters of the Amazon River. Davis has a very special way with words and does a superb job of describing, with awe, the intricacies and complexities of their mental world.