"August is almost here and I am not ready!!" Do you feel this way? I have felt this same anxiety in the past at this time of the summer anticipating the coming students and the lesson plans that need to be tweeked, and the need to think about the mistakes I made last year and focus on not repeating them again this year. And then there is the website to work on as well. I know that many of you are super stressed and I appreciate your hard work on the websites in the face of all of the other demands of your schedule.
Well, I don't have another podcast ready yet, but I wanted to share a couple of websites with you that I've found helpful.
First This website - has some good basic information for beginners to intermediate. You might find some good code tricks here and there is also a newsletter that comes to your inbox if you wish to subscribe to it. It is usually interesting with useful information.
Another good resource is a British podcast and website run by Paul Boag. His website is boagworld, which also the title of his podcast. He actually has two podcasts which I listen to weekly. His other podcast is with .net magazine with the same podcast name. These podcasts are usually nearly an hour and have a lot of the latest and greatest information. Sometimes you have to overlook a little crudeness, but not much.
Hope to have another podcast up soon. It will involve looking at the dhtml menus and the javascript code that produces them. We will look at onscreen views of the code and how to make changes to your menu by changing the code. Should be helpful.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Saturday, July 28, 2007
First Podcast - Episode 1
Today's blog with mark the inauguration of the podcast that will be associated with this blog. In this podcast, there are onscreen captures of the basic webmaster session that I presented last week. We discussed some webmaster "best practices" that I strongly recommend to all webmasters. While I will be fleixible in allowing school webmasters freedom to do much of what you want, I think there are some basic practices that we should all move in a direction toward adopting. These are covered in this podcast. The podcast is either in flash format or M4V Ipod format. In addition it will soon be subscribable through Itunes and Google.
Please feel free to provide feedback. If you disagree with some of my "suggestions", let me know why you disagree. I know that you webmasters are stretched to the limits sometimes and that you job is often a thankless one. But I know that many of you put in long hours trying to enhance and improve your sites. I'm in hopes that these onscreen tutorial podcasts will be found useful and beneficial to you. Keep up the good work!!
Starting Monday and for the next ten school days, I'll be teaching Intel at Northwood Middle School. Feel free to drop by if you would like to chat or have questions.
Please feel free to provide feedback. If you disagree with some of my "suggestions", let me know why you disagree. I know that you webmasters are stretched to the limits sometimes and that you job is often a thankless one. But I know that many of you put in long hours trying to enhance and improve your sites. I'm in hopes that these onscreen tutorial podcasts will be found useful and beneficial to you. Keep up the good work!!
Starting Monday and for the next ten school days, I'll be teaching Intel at Northwood Middle School. Feel free to drop by if you would like to chat or have questions.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Busy Times / Steep Learning Curve
These past two weeks have been quite busy as my first two weeks as the "sole" webmaster, now that John is gone. I'm sure he's having a blast traveling the east coast on his bike. I am truly jealous. John bought a new laptop and video camera for his 6-week trip and promised to put up pictures and possibly videos to his site.
Yesterday, I spent quite a lot of time with David Craig from Eastside. He took my place as webmaster at Eastside and will no doubt do a great job. He pointed me to some links of interest that you may want to check out. One website is coffeecup.com and has a free download for teachers at the bottom of the page. You have to fill out a form with your school info. One part of the software is a neat flash calendar that I found impressive. You can see it in action on David's Eastside Athletics page. This little calendar seems powerful and occupies a small amount of real estate.
Next week will be the Webmaster training courses. There are still spots available. We'll hold our class in room 114 at Greenville Middle School - just down the hall from ETS. We will talk about the new teacher websites briefly and then get right in to the content. I'll generally stress the importance of separating content from design. Basic classes will go over site organization and archiving. Intermediate classes will go over the dhtml menus and staff directories. The advanced class will involve communicating with the database through forms to turn over content responsibility to others.
Podcasts with onscreen tutorials are still in the plans.
Yesterday, I spent quite a lot of time with David Craig from Eastside. He took my place as webmaster at Eastside and will no doubt do a great job. He pointed me to some links of interest that you may want to check out. One website is coffeecup.com and has a free download for teachers at the bottom of the page. You have to fill out a form with your school info. One part of the software is a neat flash calendar that I found impressive. You can see it in action on David's Eastside Athletics page. This little calendar seems powerful and occupies a small amount of real estate.
Next week will be the Webmaster training courses. There are still spots available. We'll hold our class in room 114 at Greenville Middle School - just down the hall from ETS. We will talk about the new teacher websites briefly and then get right in to the content. I'll generally stress the importance of separating content from design. Basic classes will go over site organization and archiving. Intermediate classes will go over the dhtml menus and staff directories. The advanced class will involve communicating with the database through forms to turn over content responsibility to others.
Podcasts with onscreen tutorials are still in the plans.
Friday, July 13, 2007
Welcome to my blog/podcast!!
Welcome to my blog/podcast. This page will soon become a resource for Greenville County school webmasters as there will be onscreen video tutorials available to cover a range of topics from my basic philosophy and vision for the school webpages to tutorials on basic to advanced techniques that you can use to optimize and enhance your website.
Let me first say that my job is to support you and help you. Please don't hesitate to call me if I can ever be of assistance. Having been a school webmaster myself for five years I fully understand your frustrations. In many ways you have a thankless job. Most people have no clue as to the amount of time and effort you put in bringing content to your site, but they are quick to criticize and point out our errors. I understand that many of you spend hours developing your site and adding content. I appreciate all that you do to bring our sites to a level that you, your school, and the district can be proud of.
There are two major points that I want to stress to begin with. These are two areas that I would like for you to seriously keep in mind as you continue to build your sites. These represent commonly accepted "best practices" in web design and development and my major focus on the school and district websites. First, content is king. Before you think about fancy clip-art, animations, widgets, or other special web functions, you should make sure that every page is RICH in content. Many webmasters become guilty of being so self-focused that they spend so much time on all the things that they can do on a web page rather than the content. A web visitor's main objective is to find content at your site and will not be impressed with any "cool effects" if they cannot locate the content they came searching for. In addition the content on your front page should be interesting and non-static - that is, changing with additional "fresh" information. Your front page is your "welcome mat" to your site. If you have the same thing on your front page all the time, some visitors will lose interest. But if you change your content by including announements, news items, pictures, or calendar items, visitors will return to your site to stay informed with the "happenings" at your school.
Secondly and for the sake your survival, we all need to strive to separate content from design. Your navigational menu, top and bottom site information, and basic page formatting (CSS) need to be in separate external files and not on all pages. This will definitely make your job easier down the road. Most of you already do this, but some of you have not yet come on board. Please call me if I can help you move in this direction.
One last comment... Those of you new webmasters -- please do not come in and un-do what was mentioned above in my second point. New webmasters (and you know that I am one as well) often come in with fresh ideas and make radical changes. As long as you maintain a separation of content and design while you make these changes, I can live with that. But if you make radical changes and un-do work that others have done to separate content from design, that will just cause a lot of extra work and headaches for me and whoever takes your place when you move on to bigger and better things.
Well, these are just some things to think about. I will be posting regularly (I hope) and will begin to produce onscreen tutorials by August (hopefully).
Stay tuned.
Let me first say that my job is to support you and help you. Please don't hesitate to call me if I can ever be of assistance. Having been a school webmaster myself for five years I fully understand your frustrations. In many ways you have a thankless job. Most people have no clue as to the amount of time and effort you put in bringing content to your site, but they are quick to criticize and point out our errors. I understand that many of you spend hours developing your site and adding content. I appreciate all that you do to bring our sites to a level that you, your school, and the district can be proud of.
There are two major points that I want to stress to begin with. These are two areas that I would like for you to seriously keep in mind as you continue to build your sites. These represent commonly accepted "best practices" in web design and development and my major focus on the school and district websites. First, content is king. Before you think about fancy clip-art, animations, widgets, or other special web functions, you should make sure that every page is RICH in content. Many webmasters become guilty of being so self-focused that they spend so much time on all the things that they can do on a web page rather than the content. A web visitor's main objective is to find content at your site and will not be impressed with any "cool effects" if they cannot locate the content they came searching for. In addition the content on your front page should be interesting and non-static - that is, changing with additional "fresh" information. Your front page is your "welcome mat" to your site. If you have the same thing on your front page all the time, some visitors will lose interest. But if you change your content by including announements, news items, pictures, or calendar items, visitors will return to your site to stay informed with the "happenings" at your school.
Secondly and for the sake your survival, we all need to strive to separate content from design. Your navigational menu, top and bottom site information, and basic page formatting (CSS) need to be in separate external files and not on all pages. This will definitely make your job easier down the road. Most of you already do this, but some of you have not yet come on board. Please call me if I can help you move in this direction.
One last comment... Those of you new webmasters -- please do not come in and un-do what was mentioned above in my second point. New webmasters (and you know that I am one as well) often come in with fresh ideas and make radical changes. As long as you maintain a separation of content and design while you make these changes, I can live with that. But if you make radical changes and un-do work that others have done to separate content from design, that will just cause a lot of extra work and headaches for me and whoever takes your place when you move on to bigger and better things.
Well, these are just some things to think about. I will be posting regularly (I hope) and will begin to produce onscreen tutorials by August (hopefully).
Stay tuned.
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