Another Project Done

Building two web sites was the ultimate goal of two of my classes (one web site each, of course). Both are now done and released to the world. They are quasi-semi imitations of commercial web sites, one for an ERP company and the other for a CRM company. There is, however, no rest now as three other projects remain, as well as the last of the small assignments. Speaking of which there are four (X)HTML labs that are done but not posted on the web site; that will have to wait a week or so.

A Project Completed

The first of the end-of-semester projects is done, tested, and released. Four more to go. Back to work.

The Flower and the Trimotor

Now is the season of semester projects, heaped one on top of the other, tumbling toward exam week. Two Photoshop projects have been completed and added to the website. The first is a merging of two images in a sort of tromp l’oeil fashion, which took forever (if 16 hours is forever) and a bunch of false starts. But along the way I learned on of the Secrets of the Trade, to wit, find a tutorial or two, go through them, then find suitable images and apply the techniques learned. The second project, that of a Ford Trimotor photo aged several decades took only four hours, including the time spent on the tutorials.

Last Dreamweaver Lab

This, the last lab (#9) for the class, introduced us to the process of submitting data to a server application. Our instructor has written a short program that echoes back the information the form sends; next semester I'll learn how to write one myself using PHP and mySQL. If you should be tempted to try the form, enter fictitious data. The program on the server does not, I’m told, store anything in a database, but it is still good practice to not give out any personal information unless you really understand where it is going.

Some Photos ‘Shopped

Photoshop has a wide variety of filters out-of-the-box, as well as innumerable available out on the internet. I’ve posted three more of my experiments with them, one of which also contains effects via adjustment layers; they are the Forsythia in Autumn, Basswood in Spring, and Lake Independence at Dawn.

Cascading Style Sheets

This week’s installment is all about cascading style sheets, which you won’t see just by viewing the mini web sites (there are two, Lab 7 and Lab 9). But if you were to look at the HTML code behind each page, you would see only content. All of the formatting, except for the table structures, is done in a separate CSS file. For Lab 7, this meant designing one of the ten web pages (HTML file and CSS file), then simply referencing that CSS file to do all of the formatting on the other nine web pages, a considerable time saver. As I built the other nine pages, I came across a problem or two and a design tweak or two. To correct the problems and tweak the design, I made the change in the style sheet alone and the change was automatically applied to all pages.

Lab 7 is an attempt to build something similar to a commercial web site, with an emphasis on structural unity between pages and ease-of-use. The set of pages includes an introductory page, one about the company, one on contacts, one on service, and one for each product. Since I am not in a position to actually sell anything, the product line is a bit whimsical. In a future class I’ll learn how to connect a database to a web site which will remove the need for managing a fair amount of content on each HTML page.

Embeds

The highlight of this week’s Dreamweaver assignment was learning how to embed video, so I had to go create one. And being in possession of music notation software (Finale), I had to write a sound track. I chose not to rent or build a soundstage, however; the kitchen fit the bill nicely, the bill being $0.00. Also, the film is more of a short subject rather than feature length; the cast did not want to spend a lot of time on the project.


The other two parts of the assignment also have to do with embedding, namely an mp3 (a playlist was my choice) and a small program (Java applet). No reporters were embedded because none seemed interested. The Java applet was written during a class I took ten years ago. In the class I am taking now we have not yet progressed beyond applications that run from the command line. Towards the end of the semester I should have some newly-minted Java applets to show.