Links to my comments on other postings.... for Week 9

Guybrarian
Ryan

Muddiest Point- Week 8's Class 11/1/10

Muddiest Point
How likely am I, as a public or school librarian, to need to compose using html or xml? Isn't it more realistic that I'd create web pages in other ways?

Reading Notes for Week 9- M. Farina

11/2/10 Reading Notes for Week 9

XML Articles

                  The pages defining various terms and acronyms used to qualify SML standards are especially helpful.  Additionally, the tutorials and other resources offer excellent hands-on opportunities and references.  However, since the articles are more than 6 years old, I wonder how much of it is still relevant.  For example, RELAX NG has probably evolved a lot since this article was written.  Or perhaps one of the other schema languages (Schemation, DTD, WXS) has become the industry standard.? 

                  I enjoyed the Bergholz Tutorial article, especially because of its format and clarity.  Its clear presentation of facts was easy to understand.  Similar to last week’s tutorial, the XML Schema Tutorial pulled together the information in the three articles.

Muddiest Point - Week 7's class

My muddiest point isn't exactly about the lecture, but rather just a question about something mentioned there...BING.
I do not get very helpful results when I use Bing as a search engine, and I really prefer Google.
How do the underlying structures of these two different search engines vary?

Links to my comments on other postings.... for Week 8

Mr. Gatton
Ryan

Week 8 Reading/Viewing Notes - M. Farina

10/25 Reading Notes for Week 8 Readings/Viewings

“Beyond HTML…”

                  CMS means Content Management System; collecting, managing and publishing content.  It’s more than a database or repository.  This article details one school’s movements to switch to a CMS.

Content- disconnected from layout and design elements.  Librarians / others were then able to create guides in a forms-based environment, rather than needing to know HTML.  This saved a lot of time and evened the playing field.  Their pages contained resource links, web pages, images and files.  It’s reusable.

                  Control- “gatekeeper” reduced. Created standards in guides - common style navigational consistency.

                  Customization and Context- Taggin content is crucial; it provides meaningful organization for the user.  Customizing the metadata gives objects meaning for the user.

                  Complexity- CMS is a scalable system that can accommodate a growing body of work.  Security and backups are in place.  Author of each resource must be noted.

                  Moving toward a CMS environment requires: realizing there is a problem, search for solutions (commercial programs such as Dreamweaver, Vignette, Front Page), open source or in-house options.  The rest of the article gives very specific details of the university’s development process.  Decisions were made as to webpage/template design, for example what to include in the main section and in the side bar menu topics, resources, drop-down menus, etc.  Template then was put to use, evaluated and rewritten as necessary.  New CMS alone is not enough; training is a critical part of the system.  After the system was in use for a while, users were surveyed to identify successes and areas for improvement.

                  This article spells out the many steps involved in deciding to change to a CMS.  It will be useful for any library (or university) system considering or already implementing a similar change.  A recurring theme is the need for training during the change phases as well as throughout maintenance and regular use of the CMS.

HTML Cheatsheet

                  The members of our class are all at varying levels of technology experience and knowledge.  Therefore, those of us with little HTML experience have a nice, little cheatsheet as a reference.  Those who don’t need it get to save a tree!

W3schools HTML Tutorial

                This site taught me more than I’ve ever known about HTML.  It is beginning to make sense to me.  I liked the “Try it yourself” and editing exercises.  Although it was fun, in a puzzle sort of way, I definitely do not want a job in which I will have to create HTML!

W3schools CSS Tutorial

                As I hadn’t before even heard of Cascading Style Sheets, this tutorial was very informative.  CSS was a logical solution to problems that arose with HTML limits.  New to me are its syntax, comments, id and class selectors, etc.  As with the previous tutorial, I liked using the “Try it yourself” sections and the quizzes.

Links to my comments on other postings.... for Week 7

guybrarian
Gemma