Web Standards, Findability, and the Semantic Web.
Fall 2007, Illinois Institute of Technology
COM530R: Online Design covers very recent advancements in web production, both in terms of technologies and languages for production and in terms of modes of communication in/on the emergent “semantic web.” Read more.
Friday 10/19/2007 3:54 PM
Be sure to check your project for these last-minute issues:
Send instructor one email containing:
The subject line of the email should read “Firstname Lastname - Project 1.”
For help with screen captures on Mac, check http://guides.macrumors.com/Taking_Screenshots_in_Mac_OS_X; for Windows, check http://www.seoconsultants.com/windows/print-screen/. You only need to do a capture of one page from your site as it is visible in each browser’s viewport. (Obviously, do captures of the same page in each browser).
Thursday 9/13/2007 4:08 PM
Be sure to download and install the Pearl Crescent Page Saver Basic and Web Developer toolbar extensions in Firefox.
Tonight we will look at how both can be used as part of the design process, allowing you to build your own references (in a visual artist’s sense, kind of) to make developing CSS-based layouts easier.
Also, this reset style sheet c/o Yahoo! will be of help, tonight and into the future.
Wednesday 9/5/2007 3:18 PM
The IIT library subscribes to Books 24x7, which is an amazing and fully searchable (and readable) collection of online books. Here are some of the titles from there that I think may be worth your time, if you need some additional help with XHTML and CSS.
NOTE: be sure to log into Books 24x7 through the IIT Library site before following any of the links below.
Excellent, topical guide to XHTML markup plus a respectable collection of CSS topics.
An applied book that looks at modernizing a web site by moving it from cruddy, table-based HTML to standards-compliant XHTML and CSS. Appendices B through E are nice references to have, but a little clunky to move through online.
Some good things here, including a fair amount of historical and technological context for web languages and site development, but watch out for the chapters on things like frames, which should be avoided at all cost.
This book takes a side-by-side approach to HTML and CSS. Chapter 12 covers some basics of site testing, which the course will get into in a few weeks.
The Bible series of books are thorough, but not always the easiest to manage or navigate through. Although the book covers outmoded practices (like tables for layout), it is still worth looking at (and also tends to take a side-by-side approach to (X)HTML and CSS.
One of the earlier classics on designing and writing with CSS. The third part of the book looks at redesign projects and CSS galleries, which may be of interest.
An invaluable resource for learning to work with CSS for positioning and page design. However, it does not shy away from highly technical explanations.
More of a tips-and-tricks type reference, there are some great how-to things to be found in this one.
If you find any other helpful materials through Books 24x7, or another protected IIT library source, please email them to me. Anything you find freely available online should be posted to your del.icio.us account, of course.
Tuesday 9/4/2007 3:04 PM
I’ve made quite a few updates to the calendar for the next couple of weeks. Have a look.
Thursday 8/30/2007 5:49 PM
After emailing and conversing with a number of people in the class this week, I realized that I need to make the del.icio.us and social-bookmarking concept a little bit more clear. The same things is true for the RSS feeds that your del.icio.us activity generates, and how those things end up on the course web site (and potentially elsewhere) for all the world to see.
So first, del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is one of the sites, like YouTube, that people refer to when they speak about Web 2.0, which is a Web reliant on user-generated and/or user-submitted content. In Web 1.0, the primary information that people submitted to Web sites was financial, so that they could, say, buy something from Amazon.com.
The del.icio.us site, in other words, would have no content whatsoever if users weren’t all over the Web, tagging sites on their del.icio.us accounts.
Nice deal for del.icio.us, but potentially bad for users. If all of your links and tags are stored at del.icio.us, that ought to mean you and anyone interested in your links must go to del.icio.us to access them. But thanks to RSS feeds, this is not the case.
RSS, the acronym for Really Simple Syndication (as of RSS 2.0), is an application of XML. Meaning that RSS is a simple set of tags written using the rules of XML for sharing data between web servers and other web servers, or between Web servers and various software applications (like Firefox, which has some built in RSS feed reading capabilities).
By default, all pages on del.icio.us also have an RSS feed with essentially, usually exactly, the same content as the regular Web pages. This is how our course web site is able to read and collect everyone’s com530 tags. Once that URL is known, the feeds will keep on updating as you post new items.
Here are some links to aid your use and understanding of del.icio.us:
Monday 8/27/2007 7:45 PM
The original version of the course policy statement was missing a section called “Key Course Goals.” It has been added now. Have a look and let me know if you have any questions.
Thursday 8/23/2007 10:21 AM
We have a number of things to do tonight in Online Design. First, after getting to know everyone a little, is exploring the course web site and its features.
Assuming you’re looking at the site, this is the course news page; here I’ll post news, announcements, and other items of some degree of importance to the class. There will eventually be some other items below of a newsy-nature, but let’s hold off on that for a bit.
You’ll also see that the current week’s calendar is available on this page, in addition to the full calendar, which I can absolutely guarantee you will change fairly often over the semester. Any major changes to it will be noted here, on the news page.
Course policies can be found on the policies page (I’ll go over these in a moment); project descriptions on the projects page. Eventually, there will be a gallery of the work you all do for this class—but we’ll decide together what that gallery should be, etc.
Finally, there will soon be a collection of del.icio.us feeds on this site of materials that you tag that you find to be of interest to the class. A random selection of these feeds will appear below, once everyone sets up a del.icio.us account tonight.
Thursday 8/23/2007 10:20 AM
I urge all of you in COM530—actually, I urge everyone in general—to register the domain of your name, particularly the .com top-level domain (TLD). The primary reason for doing this is stability of your online identity. Though it might seem far away to some of you, a day will come when you’ll leave IIT. If you spend years establishing a Web presence on the iit.edu domain, climbing to the very top of Google on a search for your name, you don’t want that to evaporate the day you graduate or otherwise leave the institution and your iit.edu account is wiped from the servers. A domain that you pay for and control, on the other hand, stays with you no matter where you go.
Of course, having your site on a .edu TLD carries some important ethos (even if your login name is cryptic, like /~esmit445). The simple solution to this is to either mirror your home page at your iit.edu domain, or simply redirect traffic from your iit.edu domain space to your .com domain.
Depending on whom you purchase your domain from, it will cost only about $10 a year (or less if you opt for multiple-year purchasing). I use a service called Active Domain, but there are plenty of others. Shop around. Regardless of who you give your money to, here are some things to look for when purchasing your domain (it’s OK if you don’t understand what these things are—just make sure you get them):
Web hosting is a more complicated topic. As I indicated above, you can certainly purchase your-name.com and have it point to your iit.edu web space. You can also, as far as I know, request from IIT additional storage space for your web space, should you need it.
Space, however, isn’t the primary reason for purchasing hosting (most hosts will usually give you a glut of space that you’ll never use; my hosting company gives me a couple hundred gigabytes that, for various reasons, I hope I never fill!). When you purchase hosting from genuine web hosts, you’re not paying for the storage space so much as for the capabilities of the server: being able, for example, to control your URLs through the Apache web server, run PHP scripts, or MySQL databases.
Such advanced web server technologies are not necessarily offered by IIT (I'm still investigating which are, though). Even if they are, it’s important to remember that IIT’s IT people are responsible to the larger university, and not its individual users. If a particular web server technology reveals itself to be a security threat to the larger university IT infrastructure, for example, it may very well be turned off—even if your site depends on it.
With purchased hosting, you’re paying explicitly for web server technologies; any changes to the system must (or should) be announced to you well before they happen, if they happen. This, like your domain name itself, brings an enviable (and necessary) stability to your presence online.
If you do decide to purchase web hosting, and I certainly urge you to (largely because we can more fearlessly work with advanced, server-side technologies later in this course), here are some things to look for:
There are definitely some things to watch out for when choosing hosts, though. Chief among them:
If you would like to purchase hosting, I have a few recommendations that I’ll give you in person (I’d list them here, but that’d be too much free advertising for these companies). And if you find a host that you’re considering, I’d be happy to look at it and share my opinion...for whatever that might be worth to you.