Updating my website

Posted by on December 11th, 2015  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

It’s weird to be updating WordPress about updating my website. Huh.

My current website is about 8 years old. In its day it was cool. And it still works, but is not reponsive.

I’ve got two fully responsive pages working on the prototype design for my remodeled website.

 

I’m planning to combine the interactive thumbnails on the home page with the scrolling full size images on the landscapes page. It will be  a great exercise in CSS and Jquery. And it will all be custom work, not someone elses WordPress plugin.

I recently learned about Flexbox. It’s amazing how efficient, and easy it is as compared to the positioned floats and divs we have been using over the last 10 years. It’s been fun updating the textbook I wrote for my students.

Writing technical manuals

Posted by on December 1st, 2015  •  0 Comments  •  Full Article

In the fourteen years I’ve been teaching web design I’ve rarely found a book that works for long. The web changes at a rate that exceeds the publishing industrys ability to create content. There are always a few books that are ok, not great, but useable for a couple years. The challenge I face as an instructor is tailoring someones technical manual into a textbook fit for my classroom.

From my first year, I’ve had better results writing my own curriculum. That is assuming I can stay current with the rapid changes in web design. Once I get some good content written, I focus on polishing it up so that it works for my students. But a couple years later I poke my head up and look around and the web has left me behind. Like a rabbit watching a train disappear in the distance, I realize  I’ve got some sprinting ahead of me.

The latest change is that someone found a nice solution to the http://alistapart.com/article/holygrail problem. First we used tables for our interface design structure, then we switched to floating divs with absolute or relative positioning, and finally flexbox came on the scene. Display: flex; was expressly designed to solve the “holy grail of web design” problem. Without further ado, here is a link to the newest 10 pages in my classroom textbook on web design.