Impressive!

I've noticed that there has been a clear increase in the standards of your posts. Well done. As the course progresses there's no doubt that the quality of your posts will also progress.

There are still some of you that are not posting. Please ensure that you do post twice a week on your blogs.

Mission Statement a Definition

A general statement of a vision in word form. It is important to have a rich representation of the vision in all the senses. Then the mission statement can be written in language which allows all parties to it to derive meaning from it, yet be precise enough to guide them towards achieving it. It is a general statement of intent, normally restricted to five or six lines of type.

The above Definiton was trasncripted from the website below.

Source: http://www.ericksonianhypnosis.com.au/glossary.htm#M

File Size and Binary 10011000

So what does bits and bytes have to do with grains of rice??? 

To put file size into a visual context, I found this very helpful blog post.

"Let’s relate a grain of rice to a byte. A byte is normally eight binary bits, eg ‘10011000’. It can also be written as a two digit hexadecimal number.In terms of data, a byte is generally used to store a letter. One byte = one letter = one grain of rice." 

Source: http://blog.managednetworks.co.uk/it-support/googles-20-petabytes/

Counting in Binary for Beginners

Further insight into file size, have a look at this article that explains how binary works in a simple way.

Source: http://knol.google.com/k/zach-bacon/counting-in-binary-for-beginners/11ezkn0ytzmdj/3#

I am aware of my Google centered posts. I will soon post something from Yahoo and Microsoft.

File Size Optimization

This post is a reply to James's post asking about optimazation of images and pages for web. Instead of commneting on his post I have decided to post it here as it is helpfull to everyone. I could not put it any better in my own words than what Google has just given me in the top rank searching for "file size for web" so there it is the link. File Size Optimization

Rooming Sorted

Great News! We have fixed the rooming for the course and it is as follows:

Wednesday: Room 18 RBS
Saturday: Room 11 RBS

End transmission...

Wednesday Session 08/10

We'll be looking at how CSS works and then letting you loose on Dreamweaver CS3.

Don't got too excited, it's just a program. What you should be aiming for is to be able to swap Dreamweaver CS3, for Dreamweaver MX or HTML-Kit or GoLive! or any other product and still do a great job. The only way you'll be able to do that is by having a great understanding of the principles of how xhtml and CSS work. That's right, not the code you can quickly look that up, but the principles.

I'll be uploading the presentation to the server tonight. Breaktime's over so that's all from me for now I'm working from home today so better get back on it.

Take Aways From 04/10/08

Using the different search terms we covered in class can greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to find meaningful results from search engines.

We should be better evaluators of information and PROMPT, the tool developed by the Open University is very useful at quickly assessing information we find.
Presentation - How the message is being communicated, is it easy to navigate and understand
Relevance - Are the results we are getting relevant to our information need (and what can we do)
Objectivity - Is any argument balanced or bias? Is it giving us a chance to decide
Method - How did they go about getting data/info for their information
Provenance - What are the credentials of the information's authors
Timeliness - Is the information up to date? Does it need to be? In IT the answer is normally yes.

We also looked at the < span > and < div > tags for structuring and partitioning our document as a precursor to CSS formatting.

Take Aways From 01/10/08

All your xhtml docs need to have a < !DOCTYPE > which can be strict, transitional or frameset. We'll stick with transitional for the time being.

You need to provide the namespace attribute in the < html > tag. A namespace specifies the tags that can be used in the document.

Replace special characters like angular brackets, ampersands, currencies and spaces with their equivalent entity. Here's the w3schools list

You should validate each and every page you create (even and especially if you use a WYSIWYG tool) using the W3 Validator. Therefore, you have no excuse for not providing us with valid web pages (in the structural sense).

end transmission....