English 313

I think our in-class workshop on Thursday showed us two things: 1) The CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment has the potential to yield some incredibly creative website designs. 2) It’s going to take a lot of work to create compelling designs from scratch. I hope week 5 will provide you with the tools and the time to develop a solid draft of your Zen Garden project.

On Tuesday, we will discuss the process of turning a vague theme into a concrete visual motif, then we’ll start hunting for free, public-domain, and/or Creative Commons-licensed images to use in your new designs. Before you come to class, you should select a theme for your Zen Garden project, then email Quinn with a short proposal/description of what you plan to do. You should also read the four articles linked under the “Design Report” section on the CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment page.

On Thursday we will take a slight detour and begin exploring the art and science of information architecture. You’ll need to read a few pages from Krug and the two articles linked on the Calendar. Although we won’t be working on the Zen Garden assignment in class on Thursday, you should continue working on your individual designs outside of class throughout Week 5. By Tuesday of Week 6, you will need to have a complete draft of your design to share with your classmates during our in-class critique exercise.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to email me, add a comment to this post, or stop by my office during office hours (T/Th 11-noon and 1-2 in 435 Ross Hall).

Week 4 will mark the end of our first assignment and the start of our next big project: the CSS Zen Garden Redesign. In addition, we will learn how color works on the web, how to optimize graphics for the web, and how to use Photoshop to accomplish these tasks.

Before you come to class on Tuesday you should submit your Online Résumé assignment via email. Your email should include your memo of transmittal and the URL for your new homepage on your ISU public webspace. Your homepage should link to your online résumé. Remember, your homepage doesn’t need to be fancy at this point (you’ll add to it as the semester progresses), but it should share some of the styles you’ve created for your résumé page. Please bring a paper copy of your memo to class on Tuesday.

We will spend both class sessions next week working with color and images, with the hope that you can apply what we discuss to your CSS Zen Garden Redesign. There are short reading assignments for both Tuesday and Thursday (check the calendar for links), as well as a mini-assignment for Thursday related to the Zen Garden project. What the calendar doesn’t reflect is the fact that you should be thinking about what type of visual theme or motif you want to use for your CSS Zen Garden Redesign. Please read the assignment sheet before class on Tuesday so we can discuss your questions about the assignment and start moving forward.

I think we had a productive week in terms of reviewing basic (X)HTML and CSS principles, and I’m excited to see how you have applied these principles to your online résumés. Having said that, we’ll be moving from the kiddie pool to the high dive next week, so if you aren’t caught up on our past reading assignments, now is the time to do so. The learning curve for CSS positioning will feel unbearably steep if you don’t have the basics mastered, so buckle down and master the basics.

Finally, two quick reminders: First, I enjoyed reading your blog entries this past week. Try to add at least one new post each week to your blog and start thinking about how you can promote your blog to friends, family, and others who might be interested in your topic. Second, I haven’t received any emails from you with resources for the Links page. Each of you needs to submit five links over the course of the semester, and now would be a great time to start finding and sharing helpful CSS, color, and image tutorials.

Have a great weekend, and if you have any questions about Week 4, feel free to post them in the comments section of this entry.

During Week 3, we will continue to work on the Online Résumé assignment, move from CSS styling to CSS positioning, and introduce our next assignment: the CSS Zen Garden Redesign.

On Tuesday, we will briefly review the reading assignments for the day (see the calendar for details), then spend most of the class period in workshop mode. I want to give you plenty of time to ask specific questions about your résumés and work through some common problems that you may be encountering with this assignment. In order for this workshop to be successful, you need to come to class with an almost-finished draft of your résumé page, which means that you’ll need to spend time this weekend creating a new style sheet for your résumé and begin thinking about what you want your homepage to look like.

On Thursday, we will wrap up our in-class work on the Online Résumé assignment and begin discussing the CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment. Before you come to class, be sure to spend some time exploring the CSS Zen Garden and come to class ready to show us a few of your favorite designs and explain why you like them.

As we discussed in class on Thursday, your ongoing blogging assignment begins this week. Your blog can focus on any topic, allowing you to pursue one or more of your “focused obsessions.” There are no hard and fast rules about how often you need to post or how long your posts need to be–I just want to see you exploring the world of blogging to find out if it holds any interest for you. To get started, select a new theme/design for your WordPress.com blog and add your first post to the blog before Tuesday. In a few weeks, we’ll revisit the blogging assignment to see how it’s going and make some revisions, if needed.

After class on Thursday, a few of you mentioned that I was going a bit too fast with my in-class tutorials. I’ll try to slow things down a bit next week. If you’re falling behind during our in-class coding sessions, please jump in and ask me to slow down or review something you missed. At the same time, please remember that many of our in-class sessions are reviews of material covered in the Castro book. If you aren’t keeping up with the readings in the book, now is the time to get back on track. In a few weeks, it will be too late to catch up on the fundamentals, and your ability to succeed on the major assignments (and the exams) will be greatly diminished.

Last but not least, if you get stuck working on your résumé this weekend, or if you’re completing the readings but still feel like the concepts we’ve discussed up to this point aren’t “clicking,” please come see me during my office hours on Tuesday or Thursday.

Enjoy your weekend!

Next week in class we will begin exploring cascading style sheets, web typography, and the ever-evolving “personal website.” Please review the class calendar for specific reading assignments. Here are the highlights:

On Tuesday, we’ll talk about using inline styles to change fonts, spacing, colors, etc., on your homepages. We will also work on converting Word files to HTML without using Word’s “Save as HTML” function (which you should avoid like the plague). Make sure you complete the reading assignments in Castro’s book and in the Web Style Guide. Also, you will need to have an electronic copy of your résumé in class on Tuesday. Most of you already have a résumé in Microsoft Word format, and that will do fine. If your résumé is in another program (e.g., InDesign or WordPerfect), just make sure that you can access it in the computer lab. Whatever format you choose, be sure that the résumé you bring is up to date. Some of you may need to spend some time this weekend updating an old version of your résumé. For more information about this first project, please read the Online Résumé assignment page.

On Thursday, we’ll move from inline styles to external style sheets and discuss web typography in greater detail. We’ll also talk about fine-tuning lists and settle the details of our semester-long blogging project. Again, be sure to complete the reading assignments before you come to class, and be thinking about how you want to use your personal WordPress blog.

Finally, complete this mini-assignment over the weekend: Find at least two online résumés or homepages that really impress you. Post links to them in the comments section of this post and tell us why you like them. I’ll kick things off with a first comment to get things going.

If you have any questions about Week 2, drop me a line via email.

Welcome to English 313: Computers in the Study of English. This introductory post will help you get your bearings on the class website and find the resources you’ll need to succeed in this course.

Course Overview

The primary objective of this course is to teach you to build effective professional websites using standards compliant XHTML and CSS code. It’s OK if you have no idea what the phrase “standards compliant” means, or if acronyms like XHTML and CSS intimidate you–the syllabus for this course assumes that you have never created a website before. On the other hand, if you eat, sleep, and breathe code, this course has something to offer you, too–we’ll be spending a significant amount of time writing, both for the web and about the web. In addition to creating websites with code, you’ll create a lot of documents: proposals, usability reports, blog entries, abstracts, and so on. Along the way, we’ll take a close look at the way writing on the web has changed in the last ten years, giving you the opportunity to decide what type of online identity you want to craft for yourself.

Getting Started

We will hit the ground running during the first week of class, so you’ll need to complete the following tasks before Thursday:

• Purchase your textbooks. If you don’t have them already, you need to buy the following two books: HTML, XHTML, and CSS: Visual Quickstart Guide (6th Edition, ISBN: 0321430840), by Elizabeth Castro, and Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition, ISBN: 0321344758), by Steve Krug.
• Get a flash drive. You will need a reliable flash drive (preferably 4 GB or larger) to store your projects for this course. If you want to use the drive for other things, that’s fine, but the drive needs to be formatted to work on both Mac and PC platforms.
• Create an account on the class website.
• Create a blog at WordPress.com. It doesn’t matter what you title your blog or what email address you use to create it; you just need a place to start writing. (Note: you will be sharing your blog with everyone in this class, so make sure you are comfortable with what you do there.) When you have set up your WordPress blog, add a comment to this blog entry with the URL of your new site.

If you have any questions about any of these items, don’t hesitate to contact me.