Unca Mark's Bookshelf

I read probably more than is healthy. Really. If I didn't spend so many hours with my nose in a book, I could be out doing Other Things that might require the burning of calories. I remember as a young boy, my frustration at not knowing how to read. I just knew there was a whole world out there that I was missing out on. Before I had even started in the First Grade, I can remember my dad helping me sound-out the various symbols on the side of a Scotch Tape dispenser. Okay, that episode ended in tears, as I never got "tapee" right for "tape" but it's still a pretty good illustration and reminds me that sometimes teaching isn't easy, either. Still, I love to read.

From the very beginning, I have bought computer books and Web books. But I probably acquired four or five Web books for every computer book that came in the door. The discipline is just so broad and requires so many skills and I found myself lacking in… most of them.

I knew good design from bad when I saw it, but I didn't have the knowledge or tools to explain why this or that page was better than the next. I didn't know the language of Design. I could tell you this page made me feel happy and that one angry, but I didn't know how to talk about color. I understood there was too much Green in this photo, but I didn't know to adjust it, in Photoshop.

I had to learn the HTML markup language. I had to learn page-editing software like Dreamweaver. I had to learn image-editing software like Photoshop. I had to learn Design. I had to learn a little bit about a whole range of subjects, and I'm happy that I did. I am really glad that I don't have to spend the rest of my life looking at just some subset of the whole, like Navigation. Instead, you have to know something about nearly everything.

I learned HTML from three women: Molly Holzschlag, Laura LeMay and Elizabeth Castro. Molly wrote a giant HTML reference and then another covering XHTML, and finally a third toe-breaker that combined the two languages, Special Edition Using HTML and XHTML. Laura LeMay has a similar volume, which is also available in hardcover, as Sams Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML and CSS in One Hour a Day. And finally, I have owned several editions of Elizabeth Castro's HTML, XHTML, and CSS, a Visual QuickStart Guide.

Some of you may be asking if you need three books, and the answer for you is, probably, no. I got three because I loved to read and at the time I was learning all of this stuff I was primarily a freelance magazine writer working overnights when I had no access to any other help—everyone I knew was asleep at the time. But I had noticed that different authors will often explain the same thing in different ways. If one confused me, the odds were good that reading another would clear things up.

If I had to pick only a single book, it would probably be Castro's. Some of the illustrations are a little small—an entire computer screen reduced to three inches across—but the information is solid, and delivered in nicely-sized chunks with very good explanations.

We'll talk more about my bookshelf, I'm sure. But there is other reading, too, if you're interested. I hope to spend some time soon talking about my favorite magazines and Web sites. If you have a resource you are happy with, why not share it with the rest of us?

How'm I Doin'?

Ed Koch was famous for that line, uttered whenever he would meet someone as Mayor of New York.

How am I doing? I have given it a lot of thought, recently.

How are we doing, at providing training? Maybe even moving beyond that, slightly. Are we getting you to think? Are we sparking a little inspiration now and again? Have you been moved to Google this or that as a response to something you have read here or heard in a workshop? How about that face-to-face training? As Dr.Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?" Man, invoking two bald Americans in quotes before the first 100 words? This week ought to be good!

Where do you think we are coming up short? Would you be interested in an hour devoted to a discussion of fonts? Or would you sit through an hour of em-units, percentages and pixels? If there is something you would like to know more about, the odds are pretty good someone else would like to know more about it, too. Maybe you have heard about a new product and would like to see what all of the noise is about. Or maybe you have never quite gotten around to something that's been around a while? Garage Band? RSS? Keynote? Skype? Those freebie Office Suite knockoffs?

Probably we should not take anything for granted here. How about training locations? Are those convenient enough? Some people have asked if we couldn't do something now and again at the Student Union. They have small and large meeting rooms as well as a nice auditorium, there. And of course, there is always support for training (at the dairy store) on East Campus.

We have limited our training to daytime hours, so far. Is that okay? Would you come in for a breakfast workshop? Would you stay late for an After-School Special? Most of the workshops we do now are an hour or two hours long. Would you prefer half-hour hit-the-highlights discussions? Could you maintain focus for a whole morning, or a whole day? We have tried to offer workshops in the mornings and in the afternoons, on Mondays and Wednesdays as well as on Tuesdays and Thursdays, to accommodate the many various schedules we all keep.

I know that when Leona teaches Photoshop and when Ranelle teaches Microsoft Office, they have the application open as they demonstrate the various features. When I teach Dreamweaver, I am almost always the only one in the room that doesn't have it running on my computer. When you see it, whatever "it" is, you see it right in front of you in my workshops. One benefit of doing things my way is that you can always go back to the training site and click on a link or re-read something that confused you at first. I have heard from about half a dozen students that they really enjoy being able to go back for quick refresher looks at various pages. Would it help if I had Dreamweaver open on one screen as well, to show where something is as well as talking about how to find it, instead of pointing at it?

What about personal training? I love it when people stop by after shopping next door for a new computer or software and ask a question or two. I have shown a lot of people how this or that works, in person. Would it be valuable to you to have someone come directly to your office or cubicle for training?

Do you think we need more training? More up-to-date training? More topics? Fewer? Would you be willing to pay more, to receive one-on-one training or a book to take back with you?

We have tried so far to keep Friday's free. Would it be worthwhile for you if we held a Friday afternoon HTML HelpDesk? You could drop by the New Media Center with a URL or some screenshots, or bring in your laptop and have your questions answered?

Are you happy with the lighting, the sound and the weather in the classroom? We currently give out Wintergreen LifeSaver™ candies before class. Would you prefer another flavor?

In short: How are we doing?

The Weather is Changing

The weather is changing, again. I love this time of year. I have lived on both coasts and several places here in the middle and I can tell you this: There is nothing like an eastern Nebraska autumn.

Lumpy people like me can hide some of those lumps under layers of clothes. The air smells fresh and crisp in the morning and we can turn our air conditioners off. The cars still start and there is dew, not frost, on the windows. In another week or two we'll start to notice the colors changing. There are any number of end-of-summer holidays and harvest events and celebrations. It's a good time to be here. The wheel keeps turning, though, and if your favorite season is coming up, it'll be upon us soon enough. But for me, I love the fall.

The technology weather is changing, too. Adobe have announced that they will announce Creative Suite Four on the 23rd of this month. So we have been warned, there, I guess. I have been using the Dreamweaver CS4 beta for a couple of months and it's interesting. This is the first version that Adobe had time to get into, really, and gives a good indication of where they are taking Dreamweaver... or pointing it, anyway.

The biggest improvement that I have noticed is the ability to split-screen Code Views. We have always been able to split our workspace into two units. One was always the Design View and the only other option was Code View. You could drag-and-drop things into Design View and Dreamweaver would work out the HTML for you. You could see comments in Code View, as well as all of the various tags affecting your markup. Cool.

What's new this turn is that you can have two panes of Code View. In one, you can be displaying lines 23-75, say, of your page. And in the other you can be showing lines 320-365. So if you're repeating something you did earlier in the page you can actually see the markup you're trying to replicate while you're working on the page. You can work equally well in either pane—making edits in the top pane changes the document you scroll up in the bottom panel, and vice-versa. It's a little thing, but it's a nice feature for those of us who are spending more and more time in Code View. There are other changes, though I'm not sure everyone will see them as improvements.

Adobe seems to have spent a lot of money trying to make Dreamweaver a tool more of the hard-core developers would be interested in, again. There are workspace options and panels we've not seen before. There were four workspaces, plus one you could save on your own. Now there are eight: App Developer, App Developer Plus, Classic, Coder, Coder Plus, Designer, Designer Compact and one called Dual Screen. The insert ribbon is now a panel. The Properties panel and Search panels, apparently, are always visible now. You used to be able to drag those off or hide them. Command-[F3] hides Properties as it always has, but the top of the chrome is still there. And we've done away with the manilla-folder tabs. Now you select button/boxes. The effect is the same, but they are no longer "tabs". This is carried through to opened documents, too.

It'll take a little getting used to. But, so does the weather. And the crew that brings us CS4 apparently all still have jobs. So there will one day probably be a Dreamweaver CS5. And the great wheel keeps turning….

With a Little Help From My Friends

I am sure there have been people who learned all of this on their own, from books or Web sites. People who never had the opportunity to share a URL with someone and ask for help. They never got the chance to sit at Chipotle or Barnes&Noble with a friend or colleague and say, "Okay, walk me through this like I'm nine." Strictly speaking, learning it all from books or Web sites involves at least one other person who authored the material, but let's leave that for the moment, as I struggle to make my point: There may be people out there like this, but I have never met one, and I have been doing this since 1993.

Molly Holzschlag worked with me, during an evening or two when we both worked on the old, dead GEnie network, and then again in a series of Saturday morning online chats when we both worked at The Microsoft Network, msn. It wasn't just the two of us—Molly has always been very generous with her time and there were several of us in both instances, but it is after all my story, here.

I owe a lot to Molly and Elizabeth Castro. I owe a lot to Eric Meyer, who unravelled the mysteries of CSS several years later, when we all moved away from tabled-layout designs. Along the way, I have asked for and received help from Jeffrey Zeldman, Steve Champeon, Rachel Andrew, Larry Ullman, Patrick Delin and countless, anonymous posters to the Webdesign-L or CSS mailing lists.

In every case, I have met with a spirit of "I won't do it for you, but I'll show you how" which left me richer after every encounter. I have tried to hold up my end of the bargain, as well, answering questions as soon and as well as I could. And of course now I am teaching half a dozen workshops of my own. But we can't all write to Eric or Molly. We can't all even write to me. And that's why it's great to have a resource like the UNL Web Developer's Network, WebDevNet.

In a group the size of WebDevNet, there may not be two people who use the resources available there in quite the same way. We meet on the second Tuesday of every month, face-to-face, or "sharing meatspace" as the kids say. You are welcome to bring a problem (or a solution!) to these meetings, and they're a great way to meet new people who can help you with Dreamweaver, HTML or the Templates. From actual experience to lofty theory, I can't remember a time someone asked something and got back "I dunno." But there is much more available. You can discuss issues in real time via a special IRC channel. Or you can leave a question in the Bulletin Board and come by days later to see the response. There is a Wiki, there are e-mail contacts and phone numbers.

And you might recognize someone you regularly pass in the hallway, too. It's nice to have someone new to share lunch with. I'm a fat man. I know these things.

WebDevNet meets at 2:00pm every second Tuesday of the month. Usually, we're in the City Campus student union. Check the web page to be sure, but plan on joining us. We might even put you to work on the next design!