Course Overview, Weblogs, and CMS

We'll review the course web site, including the syllabus and the course outline. We'll also do introductions, and talk about what makes a web site "good."

At the end of class, I'll do a brief review of basic CSS formatting concepts for students who did not have CSS in their 320 classes.

Readings on XHTML

• Chapters 5-8 of Designing With Web Standards (page 141-210)

Basic XHTML should have been covered in your 320 class. These chapters will provide a refresher on basic XHTML, as well as a more extensive explanation of its importance. (We'll go back and cover chapters 1-4 next week for the discussion on web standards.)

Readings on Weblogs and CMS

• Wikipedia entries on blogs, wikis, and content management systems.
• Chapter 2: The Read-Write Web (PDF) from Dan Gillmor's book We, the Media
• Blogs open doors for developers (ZDNet)
• Why Content Management Fails

Web Developer's Toolbar

I would strongly encourage you to install the very useful Web Developer's Extension, an extension for both Firefox and Mozilla.

It has many features useful to you in your work for this course, which I'll be talking about during class today. I encourage you to install this extension on your own computers, and I've asked our sysadmins to install it on the IT computers as well.

ITS Form for Increasing Disk Quota

If you need to increase the amount of disk space allotted to you on Grace (the default is 20MB), you can fill out this form (it's a PDF file; print it out and fill it out in paper form), and bring it to me for a signature. I'll pass it on to the IT office for approval.

Wikipedia

This week I've asked you to read several articles from the Wikipedia. And as we discussed in class, every page on the Wikipedia site can be edited by any user--including you. How does that change your assessment of the site as a resource? Do you trust it more? Less?

This has been a lively topic recently in the "blogosphere," with several people running empirical tests of how quickly the site is "self-healing" when errors are introduced. Find some posts or articles written by others to support whatever position you take in your response.

Poke around a little on the site, too, and look for topics that you're knowledgeable about. Can you find anything wrong, or missing? Did you fix it?