Maria's Sweet Treats

In class for the last couple of weeks, we have been putting what we have learnt about HTML into practice, to create our own websites. We had to make our own website, for a company called Maria's Sweet Treats, a cake store that supplies mini desserts for parties and other events. It was interesting, but very hard to do. HTML is very rule-oriented, and very fiddly, and if you don't close one of your brackets, you're totally screwed. It's very time consuming and detailed.

Huan got us to download Kompozer, which is a free application that helps you write your own code. While it was great when we were making tables and headers, when I started trying to do more complicated coding, often it would not recognise it or just disappear the code that I'd typed in. I attempted to use background images within a table with text over the top (impressive, I know), but Kompozer would not let me resize the background images to fill the cells. I tried and I tried, and sweated over it for a couple of days, until I just had to let it go and move on with my life. I think that if I was going to do coding on a regular basis, I would probably purchase a more sophisticated application, like UltraEdit or Sublime Text. They're not terribly expensive, Sublime Text is $70, but I don't really need it.

Anyway, here is my website: Maria's Sweet Treats. Check out that sweet fixed position navigation bar! That one took me ages. Hopefully it's all working: when I first loaded it onto the server I realised that I'd saved my images onto my computer and then used a link for the image from there, but I needed to use the image link instead. So I fixed it, loaded it again, took another look. Then I needed to fix a link. So I fixed it, loaded it, looked again. Designing a website is incredibly time consuming and really detailed. One of the customers at the cafe that I work at was telling me that he's recently hired a company to build him a website, and it's going to cost him over four thousand dollars. Originally I thought that this amount was ridiculous! However, after going through the stress of trying to get this website to work, I've changed my mind, and decided that they totally deserve that money.

Update: I don't know why the home button on the home page isn't working. It works just fine on my mobile's browser. I suppose it's kind of redundant anyway, it only refreshes the page, but it's annoying that it doesn't work. I think I'm just going to have to accept that it doesn't work, and leave it alone, and move on to other homework. Like figuring out how the cloud works.

Twitter

Now that I've been using Twitter for a couple of weeks, I'm ready to concede that it does have some good points. I follow ABC news, and I've found that it's a good source for news and other information. I don't have a television, or really listen to the radio, so unless I read a newspaper or go online I can often miss important things. So that's one good thing.

I'm also following Marshall Breeding, who's a bit of a big-time guy in the world of Digital Information Management. I actually discovered him for Information Discovery, but some of the articles that he posts onto his Twitter account are quite relevant to this course. He also has a website which is full of interesting information. Judy O'Connell, who I've mentioned on here before, is also on Twitter, and she posts some good links for Information Management.

My favourite Twitter account, however, is louis as art. I'm not at all a One Direction fan, and I'm not even sure if it's pronounced the French way or not, but some industrial person has taken the time to find artworks that are evocative of photographs of Louis from One Direction. And some of them are brilliant. Here's a few examples:

sunrise // chris hobel pic.twitter.com/g4Kjv4AMBB
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 19, 2015

(one more first day of spring post) abstract knives // unknown pic.twitter.com/ZkjFlugYKL
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 20, 2015

pink shadows // ellen ys - #KCA #Vote1DUК pic.twitter.com/0qxaCAwTnu
— louis as art (@artlikelouis) March 28, 2015

I also just taught myself how to embed tweets! Took me a little while, but after last weeks class in HTML, I didn't panic, I followed the instructions, and did it myself! It really is amazing what I'm learning here.

HTML and my poor confused brain

This week was an introduction to HTML, and I've found it to be quite difficult so far. I think my computer has been the problem, it just refused to recognise the link that I attached to the page.



Here's a screenshot of my (Mac) TextEdit attempt:













And this is my (Windows) Notepad version:










Exactly the same text, exactly the same link, exactly the same! However, when I tried to open the link from TextEdit, my computer would tell me that the URL could not be found. Multiple attempts later, there was no change. So I copied and pasted a link that Huan gave me, and that worked, but there was no reason for it to. I still wanted to be able to do it myself, so I used myDesktop, opened a Windows application, and went through the process again, with the right result this time. There has to be something wrong with TextEdit, because I didn't do anything differently, just used a different application. So from now on I'll be using Windows for any HTMLing that I do in class.

Other than this frustration, I think I'll be okay at HTML. It seems to be reasonably straightforward, and has a lot of rules, so as long as I follow them I should be okay. I can always give myself a break and edit a Trove page when I get too annoyed with it.

EndNote and the joys of Trove

In class this week we (those of us that didn't have it) downloaded EndNote, a referencing system which will surely make life easier when writing our assignments. I've never used it before, it wasn't around when I was at Uni last time. It definitely would have helped during my Arts degree, where there were heaps of references for each essay. I used to spend hours making my reference page perfect, mostly as way to defer the actual writing part.

Also this week we were editing articles on Trove and Wikipedia. I've never edited anything on Wikipedia, never really had a desire to, but Trove is much more my style. It's a bit like a crossword, or a word search, and I love a crossword. I have been working on my cryptic crossword abilities, but a straight crossword I'm very good at. So the work that Trove needs, the editing of the text, is something that I can do for hours.

An interesting blog that i found this week is judyoconnell.com. She writes thoughtful pieces on libraries and connectivity that I've found quite helpful. She's a Teacher Librarian now working at Charles Sturt University as Course Director in the School of Information Studies. Many of her blog posts are closely related to what we're studying here, which is great.

Week Two

The collective horror over the invasiveness of Twitter was an interesting thing to behold this week. It does appear that Big Brother is watching us, and is using our own blithe disregard of privacy to do it. After reading up on it a bit, the issues are worse than I had realised. Cookies I knew about, and didn't much like, but I didn't realise that applications on your phones (Siri for example) can listen to your conversations, gmail can read your emails, and cars can tell insurance companies about your driving habits. It's frightening, really. Mother Jones has an interesting article about it, read it here

So welcome to my blog! This is a first for me, so it's probably going to change quite a bit as I get better at using eblogger.

About me - my name is Nerida, I'm in first semester of MIM, and I currently work as a barista in a cafe. It's a good place to work, and I do enjoy it, but it doesn't tax my brain. I'm ready to do something different, and I think that I would enjoy library work. Something that doesn't cover my clothes and shoes in coffee would be good as well.

My dad is a librarian, currently working as the head librarian at Divine Word University in Papua New Guinea. When I was growing up though, he was the chief medical librarian at Bendigo Base Hospital. So on my days off from school, or when I managed to persuade him that I was way too sick to go to school (I was a terrible liar, and did this a lot), I would go with him to his work, and spend my day shelving books, wandering around, and looking at disgusting diseases in medical books. So for me, libraries are fun places!

I'm not very technologically able when it comes to the internet; I can do very basic things, but I'm hoping to learn more, and to become more skilled than I am. I really skim the surface of Web 2.0, so I think that some of what I'm hoping to achieve through this course is the ability to use the internet more adeptly, and to develop my skill set when it comes to social media and interaction. Understanding how html works is also going to be interesting, I'm quite looking forward to the course, but at the same time I'm a bit nervous because I obviously have a lot to learn.