What Tradewinds, Memories and ConnectUp sites should look like after week 5

This might be helpful for you to compare your sites to.  It’s a series of screen shots I made of how the Tradewinds and Memories sites should look after completing the exercises in Unit E:

• Tradewinds
• Memories
• ConnectUp

I will try to do the same for the other sites over the next week or so.

The Dreaded .lck File…

I think I’ve found a possible solution to the continuous .lck file problem…

The .lick files need to be deleted on BOTH the flash drive site AND the server site.  Using Expression Web, there’s no way to even SEE the .lck files, let alone delete them.  This morning I was able to set up access using Windows Explorer so I could do this. I searched my entire faculty web and found 391 .lck files! 

So now your server sites are “clean” and I believe that, provided you search for and delete the .lck files on your flash drives BEFORE trying to publish again, you should be able to publish.

One thing I noticed this morning, however…Marc St. Pierre was one of the students able to publish last night in room 1026, which, according to my theory, would mean there were no .lck files on his server site last night.  Burt when I did the search of my entire site this morning, it found 1 .lck file on his site –and it had been created at 8:02 this morning. I need him to comment here and tell me how he thinks this may have happened…did he use a different flash drive than the one he used last night or publish from his c: drive this morning? In other words, did he publish from a drive or web that was “contaminated” with an .lck file, thus creating it again on the server web?  

For the rest of you, please do another search of your offline webs –remember you have to enable the search to see “hidden” files– then try to publish to your server web and let me know how it went.  If you could resond here in the blog it would be helpful for everyone to see.

Thanks.

jk

Read more about the dreaded .lck file here.

We are changing classrooms as of 2/25/10

It’s confirmed –IT was able to update the computers in room #1026 so, we’re changing rooms starting THIS THURSDAY: 2/25/10.

See details in previous post.

Homework Assignments Posted for Weeks 6-10

The Home work for weeks 6-10 is now published on my site at: http://faculty.ccri.edu/jkirby/comi_1770-71/homework-010s6-10.shtml

IMPORTANT: Save the downloaded student data files and all web development work done in these homework assignments to your flash drives. Mark all files in the sTudent_data folder “Don’t publish” so that they do not get published to the server along with your work.  If the homework requires written work, please use MS Word and save to a folder within your (username) folder on your flash drive to be published along with your HTML work. Be sure to set-up a header on each page of the written work with the course name, the assignment, date and your name.

Please note: “Reading” assignments given in each week’s schedule include the development of the “Tradewinds” web site.

The homework/classwork page is updated often –check it regularly for changes.

We might be changing rooms this week…

It looks like we’re going to be able to change rooms starting THIS THURSDAY.

It’s not 100% definite yet so watch for another e-mail from me.  

When it does happen, the new room will be #1026. It’s right off of the dining commons on the 1^st. floor. The entrance is the first door on the right after you go through the double-doors from the dining commons into a hallway marked “1031” below. I’ll try to remember to put up some temporary paper signs for Thursday night (if we are able to get it ready by then).  

 

Be sure to have everything up-to-date and ready to publish Thursday night. If you need an extension, please e-mail me as soon as possible so we can discuss.

Remember…this is not definite yet so check your e-mail again before Thursday.

Browser Add-ons/Extensions

 The following are my recommended add-ons for your Firefox browser:

• HTML VALIDATOR (based on Tidy and OpenSP)
  HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of  an icon in the status bar when browsing. The details of the errors are seen when looking the HTML source of the page.
  The extension is based on Tidy and OpenSP. Both algorithms were originally developed by the Web Consortium W3C. And now extended and improved by a lot of persons. Both algorithms are embedded inside Mozilla/Firefox and makes the validation locally on your machine, without sending  HTML to a third party server.
• The Web Developer Toolbar extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Firebug – Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.  Firebug 1.5 requires Firefox 3.5 or higher.

Please note: As of 2/19/10, Firefox 3.6 is the latest verion of that browser. [download now]

Supplement your CSS knowledge

Save a lot of work with CSS!

With W3schools.com’s CSS tutorial you will learn how to use CSS to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once.

Start learning CSS now!

Hello COMI 1770 Students!

Welcome to COMI 1770’s Weblog at WordPress.com.  Please feel free to comment and contribute.

~Jim Kirby
Instructor, Fundamentals of Web Development Using Expression Web (COMI 1770)

More on Photo Albums

Styling a Tableless Gallery – Part I

~From The CSS Anthology, 2nd Edition, Rachel Andrew

If you need to display a collection of images –perhaps for a photo album– a table may seem like the easiest way to go. However, it is possible to acheive this without using a table –(by using CSS); it provides some significant benefits that tabled versions lack.  [see how to do it]

Also see: Tableless web design

Helpful links

Here are some helpful links to web development resources.  Most of these can be found on my web site so, I’ll link to that first:

• http://faculty.ccri.edu/jkirby/
• Styling a Structural List as a Navigation Menu – This is another way to use an unordered list <ul> as the basis of your navigation. 
  • Download HTML (open with IE7, select, "File > Edit with Expression Web".  With IE8, select, "Page > Edit with Expression Web")
• Publishing your site to a server
• Converting Word Files (or any text) Into HTML – We made this for SharePoint Designer but it applies to EW as well.