Stu, Stu, Studio

We were trying to add a script to play some music on Jessica's site, and it wound up taking us two days. Here's what we ended up doing:

1. Jessica found an HTML script online that would play an mp3 file. It'd be great if she got that url for us.

2. I found a page with a long, difficult to search guide on how to add HTML to iWeb pages. It is here.

You have to
i) 'Publish to a folder' in iWeb
ii) Open the web page with a text editor (we used word), and type in the html
iii) Save the web page as a text file ending with .html
iv) Move the new page into your iDisk folder, which is like a U drive for you .mac page.

With the creation of my eportfolio there were many questions I had along with lots of confusion along the way.  Fortunately for me, I had Leah, to assist in the process of beginning my eportfolio.  Using iweb was a completely foreign concept for me and the last time I had created a portfolio was about three years ago and did not remember how I had gone about that as it was a great difficulty for me to accomplish as well.  Upon opening iweb Leah was there to guide me through it, showing me how to open new files, templates, and hyperlinking external, internal webpages, as well as files.  Once I navigated my way through iweb I had to take into consideration thing I needed to accomplish.  I began with a rocky start and had many questions, but I knew I should use trial and error before consulting Leah so I could figure things out on my own and tutor others in the future.

I have chosen night or night time as my theme for my e-portfolio. I really like using dark colors for projects and designs. I have always enjoyed the night and have always been a night person.  Usually the main events of my days have always been at night. My days have been spent relaxing, resting, or preparing for I have planned for that evening. The sports I have played through out my athletic career have been played at night, with the occasional day games. Through out my music career, all of my major concerts have bee at night. I guess you could say the night is when I come out.

Playing the role as a tutor to Daniel was a little bit difficult because he appeared to have everything under control and the way he sets up and writes his web-pages is completely foreign to me in that he self-taught himself how to write the web-pages.  He did need help on the content of his work because he didn't have a lot included in his pages thus far so I tried giving him examples of things that I had done to illustrate various concepts, but knowing he couldn't copy my work.  I could make suggestions given what he was interested in and ultimately it will be up to him to decide what he chooses to input in his web-pages

I felt like my strength as a tutor was my ability to find an answer for a question I don't know the answer to. I have little to no experience with macs, iweb, or .mac, but I was able to play around with it until we got it taken care of.

The downside, of course, was that it took a great deal of time.

The thing I admired the most about Jessica's help was that she gave me concrete examples from her work that inspired me for my own, but I couldn't use any of them directly. I have a hard time when people ask what they should put in their portfolios, because I don't want them no make a copy of mine. Jessica showed me some of her content, but she also showed me how to make suggestions that are helpful but not transferable.

As you role-played as an associate, what do you think were your strengths? What did you do well? What (during the session that you tutored) was a success? What did the other person do that you thought would be useful to emulate?

The theme I selected for my portfolio was the traditional eastern game of go. I think the biggest thing it adds to the portfolio is cohesion. The portfolio reflects my life, which is somewhat disjoint. I wanted to include the foci of Japanese, English, and Computer Science, and they don't really go together very well. I thought that they intersect quite nicely, however, in go.

Go is an eastern game, and still widely played in Japan much like chess is here. At the same time, it has a sense of aesthetic that I thought reflects the aesthetic appreciation of literature and the aesthetic aspect of rhetoric I've studied here at Clemson. Finally, it is a game, and a highly logic-based one at that, which corresponds to the skill-sets I've developed in my Computer Science classes.

The theme of my web-page is that of a landscape background.  I chose this because the outdoors are such a large part of my life and being out in nature and experiencing new things outside.  I enjoy the sunsets, seaside, the mountains, and cliffs.  Each tie into each other in a flowing process because parts of the web-page like my visual creative piece stems from a writing I did on my Inspiration and within that writing I bring in nature and tie it into that paper so taking this theme to the forefront within my web-page seemed like a natural idea.  These landscapes represent various parts of my life, which also make it possible to tie into the links and the process itself.  I have highs and lows, beautiful days and rainy days, a life of new beginnings of sunrises, new endings with sunsets, and changes of life with the tide.  

For the most part my portfolio is complete.  I have all the pages I want to include in it, however, I am having some trouble linking power point into the pages.  If I cannot figure this out I will probably save it and link it as a picture through word document like I originally had it.  Once all of these links are complete the portfolio will be done except for the reflection piece and with that I will complete after all the other pages are completed.  I was also trying to insert copied pictures through a web-page document, but it was not working so I will be fiddling around with that a little bit more and seeing how to get it all up and running.  Right now it's all about getting everything working and seeing how to do so and what works and what doesn't work and how to fix these things.  On Tuesday I discovered new templates that I liked better and so I changed all my templates to the new ones, which took some time, but I'm happy with the result and I will also have a picture slideshow set up on my creative piece that I'm very excited about!  Other than the road blocks mentioned previously everything else is going right as planned and I was able to link word documents whereas before they were downloading onto the computer and not simply first taking you to it.  Once I figured that out I was able to have my files and links go more smoothly. 

Last night I recieved help from Jessica and Leah on my webpage. I made all the webpages I will need and have the basic outline for each. The only thing left is to add the text. I encountered some trouble when trying to change the background to a dark grey, but Leah swooped in and saved the day. Unfortunately, the saving of the day was short lived. I wanted all the backgrounds to be the same color, but I couldn't seem to save the certian color pallet that I wanted. I will have two pages with music on them, the re-mediation page and the men's glee page. Obviously my plans are subject to change.

Today I was working on getting a decent-looking starting page up for my portfolio. I've spent some time developing a theme, so I know what I want it to look like, but I'm still not entirely sure what is supposed to be on it.
I worked on getting a skeleton of my page up today, so I can get something accomplished while I'm trying to figure out what to put into it. I used a template I built for some earlier web pages, but of course I have to convert it. One of the problems with this is that, while I understood exactly what I was doing when I put it together, I don't remember too much of that.
This resulted in having to look up how to use CSS (or cascading style sheets for the rest of us) to set an image as a background. The effect is neat, because I can use pictures in each of my boxes if I want, but it took me some time to figure out that the scripts look for files on based on their directory, not the directory of the page that calls them.
We were "thinking aloud", which meant as long as I was working on the same task, I was flattered with the attention of people wondering what I was doing. This resulted in a pretty good conversation with Leah about CSS, although I'm not entirely sure I explained it correctly.
I'm hoping to have a better idea by next week about what in the world I'm going to put in the page.

Question: Can I link three files to the same link?
Link it to another page and have the files in links to that one?
Noooo that’s not what I want
Create a new file that has all of the other files’ text in it and link it to that file?
That’s better.

Daniel does not think out loud.

Daniel needs to lighten his background – he does not like to think aloud and help me with my notes.
Daniel, you don’t have to worry about the reflection now, chill out a little.
What are the requirements again?

JJ says hold on leah!

How do we change the background color on the border of the webpage?
Go to inspector – browser background - color fill – choose color

Daniel still is not speaking so I do not know if he is encountering problems. If he is, he is probably answering his own questions bc he knows all.

Now he is working with his style sheets to change the background of his weboage he is doing this by creating a template for all of his pages.

I just learned a lot about life from Daniel. He is using a style sheet. I did not know what a style sheet is. It is saved in the same folder with the html files and you tell the html page to refer to the style sheet for instruction as to how to arrange things. The fact that the style sheet wasn’t in a code or online is blowing my mind. Also, the fact that you can make a style sheet in word – this changes my life. No really, I’m being serious. I thought html was computer code, a language that only the Internet understands. Apparently the Internet is even smarter than I gave it credit for because its just English instructions basically.

Jj just combine her taps yearbook stories into one spread. Once she has all of them in one file she will put them into the webpage.

Daniel looks very intense and concerned about this background fill. Or maybe he is concerned about something he is not sharing. Daniel, bottling your emotions is not good for you.

The colors of the links are right when you ask inspector what color it is, but it does not change the actual color geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez.

William got into the health sciences program today a whole day early YAAAY

Today I focused on the details of my draft and added background color fills to the borders of pictures.  Once this was complete I wanted to change the text color of my links, but when I changed the text color and it said it was changed to purple, but it did not show up as that color.  Unfortunately, it is now the end of class and we just ran into this problem.  Hopefully, we can solve it by the end of the next class period, otherwise it will continue to haunt us.  I did succeede in compiling my TAPS (yearbook) stories into one spread.  Once I copy my last story from the TAPS office I will be able to create a link from my Clemson Involvement of TAPS to a word file.  I decided after inputting pictures into my remediation link that I did not like how it turned out so I deleted the pictures and am going to change my remediation to a different story ("My Inspiration") with pictures relating to the story.  

portfolio

Today I worked on my web-page with the help of Leah and we ran into a few problems including linking my pages to internal pages. We tried several different variations and we saw a little box that was checked and said to keep all links inactive, which was prohibiting us from continuing the pages. Once we un-clicked the little box it allowed us to link the pages to various other internal pages. After we discovered this we wanted to dance on the table and shout for joy! The next problem was linking files onto internal pages that published on the website, but wouldn't show the link on the draft. We concluded that there was nothing we could do because we tried the same thing on Leah's draft as well so we left it as it was. With the file links we downloaded it as a picture into several different forms including jpeg and png, but none of these seemed to work, which is when Leah tried the same thing on her draft and we checked the website and it was linking on there. I also wasn't sure if I could rearrange my already set pages on my draft, but Leah showed me that I could by moving the named links on the left hand side of the page. Overall, these processes further helped me understand iweb more and has been enabling me to improve upon my draft.

Today we had trouble working with links. Victory number 1= discovering the very important and right there in front of our face box that says "make links inactive" which was clicked so JJ's links were not working. Once we got that figured out we moved on to linking documents into her health sciences page. When we linked a file to the page, it did not work within iWeb but it worked on the published site. To find out if this was normal we opened my portfolio on my iWeb and it was the exact same way. Although there must be a way to change this, we decided to move on since it work online. Every time we encounter a problem we usually resort to the trial and error way of fixing it. This is usually what happens when working in the studio. There are so many problems with so many different programs it is impossible to feel prepared for any question a student might have. It usually takes someone sitting down and walking through every possible solution until something works. One think that I have found is that usually, although the studio assist.s don't know the answers right away, they at least know what to try and are not afraid to play around with it until a solution is reached. It is also important to be prepared to accept the fact that you may not be able to solve something - like JJ and i were unable to fix the linking problem. No student is ever offended if you tell them that you will find out the answer and get back to them.

Today I worked on my web-page with the help of Leah and we ran into a few problems including linking my pages to internal pages.  We tried several different variations and we saw a little box that was checked and said to keep all links inactive, which was prohibiting us from continuing the pages.  Once we un-clicked the little box it allowed us to link the pages to various other internal pages.  After we discovered this we wanted to dance on the table and shout for joy!  The next problem was linking files onto internal pages that published on the website, but wouldn't show the link on the draft.  We concluded that there was nothing we could do because we tried the same thing on Leah's draft as well so we left it as it was.  With the file links we downloaded it as a picture into several different forms including jpeg and png, but none of these seemed to work, which is when Leah tried the same thing on her draft and we checked the website and it was linking on there.  I also wasn't sure if I could rearrange my already set pages on my draft, but Leah showed me that I could by moving the named links on the left hand side of the page.  Overall, these processes further helped me understand iweb more and has been enabling me to improve upon my draft.