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First, let me say that I am tickled (mah goodness, ah think ah’m coming down with the vapors) at how many of you are commenting on your fellow students’ blog posts. Keep it up! Remember that commenting on blogs is part of the participation grades and demonstrates to me that you are making good use of Google Reader.

Now, on to blog posts that caught my eye:

•  Larene makes a good point about winter driving – people are dying out there for no good reason
• Shanna uses an entry as a vehicle to unpack a lot of thoughts about moving
• Jason begins the saga of going to gamer heaven (or something like that) in Las Vegas
• Linda found a helpful plagiarism resource demonstrating what plagiarism is and how to avoid it- which allows me to allude to an obsession of mine and direct you to the Creative Commons group. The whole idea of intellectual property is slowly changing.
• Dennis has an entry guaranteed to make you interested in ol’ Horace Kephart
• Move over Fodor’s and Michelin guide– Jon is on the restaurant critic beat
• Jacqueline delved into the hexadecimal color question and found a useful site about it
• Shawn found very useful information on choosing font faces for web pages
• Last, but definitely not least, Lyn has info on how you can recycle and support a good cause at the same time (and she’ll do all the work)

As your blogs start getting indexed by search engines and the tags (categories) pulled into various applications, you will start to receive traffic from outside the classroom. In fact, I spy the first “Spam Blog” referral of the semester (Frances– don’t delete that until after class tonight please, I’d like to share it) which also demonstrates the idea of Pingback and Trackback. Also:

• we have some spam comments to talk about (pls don’t delete these until after class)
• Sue’s foray into public radio has been noticed,
• as was Shanna’s Mountain Dew rant…

As of 12:30p today the class gradebook is up to date with all grades. Any items that have no score or partial scores are either assignments I have not seen or assignments I have responded to you via email regarding revision(s).

The last two assignments on the current gradebook will be pointers to blog posts you should have already made. The submission forms will be available shortly.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Not a lot of time for my witty commentary (I can hear the sigh of relief already), but I wanted to direct you to some student posts that caught my eye this week!

• Shanna is perfecting the rant-as-comedic-art… perhaps she can replace Dennis Miller who has gone all Right-Wing.
• You might hear Dennis feverishly talking about “Kephart”– he has shared a bit more about him and a tasty recipe…
• Frances ponders how bad web pages have become harder to find…
• Toria is counting on all of you to answer a deep philosophical question
• Viola gives blood– and it turns into quite an ordeal!
• Jason points out a cool new Google Image Search feature that I hadn’t noticed yet.
• Jacqueline worked ahead and found some examples of most of the color schemes for next week’s assignment
• Laura might not snap after the Yankees phoned it in…

Essentially, the homework due next week is to have worked through two chapters of the text (Ch. 4 and Ch. 5)  and published the resulting files to your web space. Most of the things you do in the exercises will be familiar to you from class, but not everything… and that’s good! In fact, the ideal method for using this material would be to work through the text assignments before we go over them in class!

There is one important change from the text assignments: your text will advise you to create a new set of site settings for each chapter. I do not recommend that. Instead, drag the chap_0x folder appropriate for your chapter into your existing root folder (on your flash drive or laptop) and then edit it as you would the contents of any other folder.

This way, when you publish the folder, you will access the files at: http://community.uaf.edu/~yourid/chap_0x/ 

Not all textbook exercises will modify (or create) and index.html file. That’s OK… as long as I can find your chapter folder I can see the rest.

More good stuff in ye olde blogges. A sampling of stinky sites– there were many good choices here:

• Richard nominates MySpace, not just for design but for letting all those spammy fake friends through
• Viola provided an entertaining narrative along with one of the worst site designs of the group
• Shawn gave a comprehensive assessment that made some unique points
• LaRene gets a personal prize for picking the site UAF students and faculty alike love to hate
• Monica’s interesting choice used to be famous for its innovative design
• Greg managed to work ire and politics into his catch
• Sue gets a million bonus points for being witty and comprehensive… and finding the worst site I’ve seen (experienced, been given convulsions by) in years

And some non-directed posts (you really don’t have to title them that way) that caught my feed-reading eye:

•  Jason’s trying to get to Vegas to attend MLG Las Vegas. Go Jason!
• Sadie would like to remind everyone that Librarians Rock. And they do. One of the sites I have been reading the longest is that of Jessamyn West blogger and librarian and all-around super hero.
• Shawn shared an interesting post by Lee Lefever regarding having “blogrolls” (lists of links to other sites) on your site…
• And Laura really hates the Red Sox. Still. I’m not even going to link to her post in case there are Red Sox fans in the class who might cry and make a scene…

As was the case last week, there was more good stuff than I can highlight, so keep reading those feeds! And if you aren’t contributing, it is time to get down, thrown down, lay down and write it down.

There are a variety of great web material out there for aspiring designers. I want to focus on a few resources for the people in the class who continue to find themselves ahead of where we are. These are what I would consider to be advanced-beginner to intermediate level articles, tutorials and resources.  One thing you will notice is that, beyond the beginning level (or situations where one is maintaining and slightly changing an existing site rather than creating new things from scratch), graphic editors like Dreamweaver are hardly used.

• Entheos has quite a few tutorial tidbits in addition to their paid products.
• Digital Web Magazine has a series called Web Design 101 that starts with the most pressing need for the intermediate designer: CSS positioning. This is the fundamental area that must be immediately tackled to move beyond the beginner level.
• It’s easy to get lost in the details and forget about overall aspects of design: formatting, color, white space, typography. Smashing Magazine has many advanced topics, but some will be understandable already, such as this piece on white space and simplicity.
• About.com Web Design links to all kinds of information at all levels… worth keeping up with (or subscribing to, hint hint)