Lauren's Blog

October 31, 2006

This is a test blog...i have no idea if it is going to work or not..let's try a link I guess to SCI's website

It's Halloween but our class is stuck playing with Html codes.

So here's what Halloween looks like at SCI

Scared Yet???

If you like what you see click me!

This whole page took me like 30mins to make so I guess its safe to say that I'm a novice but it kinda SCARES me that I did it at all. I did have a little help though.

CLICK HERE TO CHEAT LIKE ME!

Summer Camp/After School Program

Summer Camp/After School Program is for ages 6 to 13 year olds to learn new things as well as have fun. While they learn new things they will get to meet new kids and hopefully be able to get a new friend. The kids will be active before and after summer camp classes. They will also be active as soon as they get there homework done. The Actives that they will get to do is dodge ball, foosball, video games and board games. They will need to be picked up by 6pm.

heres how a link works. link here: link here to sci.

Are adults too old to dress up for Halloween?

You are NEVER too old to dress up for Halloween. I think it's great when adults dip into their "child at heart" tendencies. I work at a doctor's office that provides employment to about 75 adults. Today is Halloween, and at work, 2/3 of our employees joined together and dressed up for a costume contest. The different departments of the clinic(reception, medical records, administration, and individual doctor's pods) dressed up, each with a different theme. Now, you have to remember the employees who participated ranged in age from 21-60. You talk about fun...I have never seen adults have such a great time at work. We all joined together and laughed and enjoyed each other's costumes and creative ideas. It was fun to see everyone else's costume, and laugh at all the silly ideas. We had such a fantastic time, and there were no kids involved. With all of that said, the myth that adults are too old to dress for Halloween is just that, a myth...today proved this to me. So take a step out of your comfort zone next year, and dress up for Halloween, maybe you could suggest a costume contest at your office...if you let yourself have fun with it, you WILL NOT regret it!
Here's how a link works. Link here: to sci.

What I did on Halloween

Why is it so hard to come up with something to write? Seriosuly. My limitations are nearly nonexistant, but for the past five minutes I've been staring at a blank screen. Well, obviously not anymore, but still.

In all seriousness, though, Halloween is one of the more fun holidays, in tradition at least. There's nothing like a good haunted house this time of year, even though the good ones are a minimum of 15-20 minutes away from Springfield. However, a more important holiday actually takes place the day following Halloween, which is the Day of the Dead (gotta love Wiki). This holiday isn't heavily celebrated in the US, even though it is celbrated among Mexican-American communities.

I will be somewhat celebrating the Day of the Dead. I'll be watching Lost, where someone is rumored to kick the bucket on tomorrow's episode.

I'm going into this next part blind. Part of this assignment is to put a Halloween-y (hehe, I said weeny) picture in here. I have no idea what this is going to look like. For all I know, it could be a nice picture of kids trick-or-treating, or a screen shot from Saw III. Here goes nothing:

Yeah, that IS pretty scary...

To do this one, you're going to need to open several windows. So let's get started:

1. First, keep this one open.

2. Then click on the Microsoft Explorer icon and open another one. Go to Blogger, and get into the dashboard. Leave it open, too.

3. Open a third window, and go to one of the HTML cheat sheets we've looked at. That should be enough for now.

Now you're going to create a web page ... well, actually, a blog entry created by using the HTML tags. Go back to the first window and make sure the "Create" field is set on "Edit Html." Decide what you're going to call it.

If you were starting from scratch in Notepad, you would put an HTML tag and a coupole of other codes at top. In Blogger, you don't have to. So let's not. Let's just start with a headline. Decide what you want to call it, and use the headline tags (H1, H2, etc.) to set it in big, or not-so-big type. Don't forget to close the headline with a bracket-slash tag that repeats the HTML code, too.

Drop down a line, and start typing the text of your blog in body type. Say anything you want that isn't illegal, obscene, loaded with trans-fats or otherwise unworthy of you. Somewhere in your text, use a hypertext (a href="URL" etc.) tag to create a link. Don't forget to close it with a slash-a tag.

Do you want a nice Halloween type picture to put in your blog? Sure. Why not? Well, here's one ... well, here's its URL ... http://www.sci.edu/brink2.jpg ... all ready to paste in between a couple of image tags, which you'll find on the cheat sheet and paste into the blog.

Easy, isn't it? It works because blogs are written in HTML, and the Blogger dashboard lets you write a simplified version of HTML. You can also click the tab over to "Compose," which gives you a WYSIWYG* screen. But I think it's more fun to do the editing in the HTML setting.

You know what WYSIWYG stands for, don't you? It's an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get." About 10 years ago when WYSISYG graphics were still new, you heard it used a lot. Now almost everything is WYSIWIG, so you don't hear as much about it. But it's still there.

A couple of links here to help you get under way before Tuesday's class, chosen almost at random out of the many that popped up when I did a Google search engine keyword search.

The best, I think, is called "Getting Started with HTML" on the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) website. W3C works with international standards on the Internet, and to my layperson's eye looks like it has pretty high-powered and current information available. The turorial is by Dave Raggett of W3C, who lists a D.Phil. from Oxford and an extensive range of work with HTML on his curriculum vitae. More to the point, it's very clear and beginner-friendly without being cutsey about it. It's the one I plan to keep going back to, but I'll list a couple of others below as well.

"So, you want to make a Web Page!" A beginner-friendly tutorial by Joe Barta at PageTutor.com . PageTutor sells memberships, as well as books and companion CDs. But Barta's tutorial gives away enough samples of the product to get you started -- and, he surely hopes, to appreciate his approach enough to buy more product. I sampled the first three lessons, and I didn't get lost. Which is saying something.

Webmonkey is a large website with a variety of information about web design. Its "Authoring" directory has links to an introduction on HTML tags, a "teaching tool" that lets you practice using the tags and an "HTML Cheat Sheet" that I keep in my favorites file at home.

Several years old but still very basic, clear and informative is an Introduction to HTML by Eric E. Meyer of Case Western Reserve University. It's copyrighted 1995-1996, and in an appendix on then-recent developments dated June 30, 1996, Meyer predicted " this whole Appendix will be out of date within the next nine to eighteen months." He was probably right on that, but the basics of HTML are the same.

Your assignment for next week: Learn about type. Here's a link to a good website. It concentrates on the internet, but I guess that makes sense ... that's where I found it, the internt. I'll post others as I find them. -- pe

Typography for the World Wide Web follows the same basic principles but modifies them for webpages. For a good introduction, study the Web Style Guide (2d ed.) by Patrick Lynch and Sarah Horton. You'll find links from the start page to discussions of type, page design and other things you need to know in order to go on line. Surf around the pages about typography, page design and the differences between dead-tree (paper) and web-based design principles. But especially read up on type.

"Typography," say Lynch and Horton, "plays a dual role as both verbal and visual communication. As readers scan a page they are subconsciously aware of both functions: first they survey the overall graphic patterns of the page, then they parse the language, or read. Good typography establishes a visual hierarchy for rendering prose on the page by providing visual punctuation and graphic accents that help readers understand relations between prose and pictures, headlines and subordinate blocks of text."

I saw this and thought I would share. High school buddies die in Iraq

The story found here, I found to be very informative. Overall, this story sheds light on even more controversy surrounding 9/11.

Constructively, I noticed that many times they did not use a period when using Mr. Or Dr. "But Dr Rice said yesterday she could not recall the warning from Mr Tenet." I'm assuming that this is Australian punctuation rules, but it struck me as odd when reading it. Here is another excerpt:

" 'I don't know that this meeting took place, but ... what I'm quite certain of, is that it was not a meeting in which I was told there was an impending attack and I refused to respond.'

"Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia and other stops in the Middle East, Dr Rice said she met Mr Tenet daily at that point, and has no memory of the wake-up call from him described in the book."

Whether this actually happened or not, this is just another blemish on the already tarnished Bush administration.

And Doc, to answer your question from a couple of weeks ago, to put something in a different font, go into "Compose" instead of "Edit Html."