That's right, after about a one month hiatus, my website for all things academic is back in action. I really would appreciate any comments and criticism you have about it. I am an utter n00b at most of this.Wondering what motivated the revamp? To be honest, I was quite happy with the old version that I built with iWeb. It turns out that iWeb was not as happy with it. After adding a blog entry in the native iWeb interface, the application crashed and would continue to do so after any further modifications to the blog pages. Since I don't really foresee this type of website changing very often (aside from the blog section), it didn't make much sense to me to continue along that path.
I made the effort of actually taking my computer in to an Apple store to see if their employees (I find it pretentious to refer to them as geniuses) could offer any suggestions. The technical support rep was congenial and sympathetic to my plight, but in the end, entirely unhelpful in resolving issues with a corrupted iWeb site.
At this time, I sought the advice of the foremost computer guru I know: Ben, one of my best friends for over 10 years now. His advice on which GUI-based website builder to use: None. Every site he's written has come from the vast white wasteland of a plain text editor (he recommended gedit, by the way). I can't really blame him; nothing teaches you how something works like building it from the ground up.
So, I pulled all of the site's files down from the University of Hawaii server and set out to write my second website (the first being the v0.0 of this same website, but its layout was worthy of Geocities, and I don't really like to talk about it).
In this process, I've become much more familiar with HTML elements (and the fact that
there are only about 20 or so relevant tags), cascading style sheets (CSS) to format the content, and browser versus server functionality. None of these would have come out of simply recopying the iWeb site. Throughout the process, the website HTML Dog proved an invaluable resource for me to constantly look up (and re-look up) the proper terminology for the effect I wanted to create.As of today, the site is up and fully operational. Features I am particularly fond of are the Post-it "contact" info, and the embedding of this blog in the "News" page. If you'd like, go ahead and unsubscribe from the old blog's feed and add this one. Also, yay for comments.
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Clay
Hmmm...looks like Blogger, but you say it's better? We need to talk. I have a need to design my own web page with my blog as an element. So, I'd appreciate more info.
ReplyDeleteHey there! You're very right, the blog is "hosted" by Blogger. However, I wanted it to be displayed on one of "my" UH pages.
ReplyDeleteThere are apparently several ways to do this, but I went with an iframe (inline frame):
&< iframe src="http://kcmckell.blogspot.com/" width="790" height="720" &>
Your browser may not support inline frames. Please visit my &< a href="http://kcmckell.blogspot.com" target="http://kcmckell.blogspot.com"& > blog the old-fashioned way&< /a &> (links to external site: Blogger.com).
&< /iframe &>
To be sure, this isn't the optimal way to achieve the look I got. And I may be looking to upgrade when I have the time. People say that iframes can be exploited by ne'erdowells, but I have to look into this a bit further.
I'd love to talk about site building. That's the second-best way to get better :)
I'm right there with you, Clay. I'm putting together a website similar to this one for those potential employers out there, and I'm finding iWeb managable, but ultimately annoyingly constraining. Mind if I steal your code here and there as a starting point for my own?
ReplyDelete@Ryan: Go right ahead, and thanks for asking. I'd love to see what you come up with.
ReplyDelete