Thoreau, part deux

Well, once again I put off Assignment 8 until its due date (this past Sunday), though fortunately I was able to finish it a few hours later. Between the time I started to look at it and its conclusion, though, I definitely panicked and if it wasn't for the help of Tim Schlak and others on the message board (and particularly Amiya Hutson as well), I'd still be lost. Furthermore, in a fit of panic, I called a few classmates to see if they had any hints for me. I got their respective voicemails, but each of them called me back (again, within a few hours). Thus, thanks to everyone who commented on the board and to those who offered to help as well.

The first part of the assignment was easy, or so I thought at first. All I had to do was make 10 annotated hyperlinks. To be honest, I'm STILL confused about what exactly the annotations were supposed to be like and the instructions in the syllabus for this assignment certainly didn't illuminate it. Furthermore, even after receiving more specific instructions on the message board, I was still confused. At some point, I just left it alone, but I'll get to that part later. The first part was simple enough. This time, I used Amaya (which looking back on it, was a mistake) instead of Kompozer and frankly, I don't like it at all. After opening up my fragment and putting together 10 hyperlinks, I was confused about what do next. I just couldn't grasp the CSS concept as well as that of external styling. Thus, I started a thread on the message board and asked for help. Within a few hours, I got several responses and they were each very helpful. Thanks again to Amiya for pointing me in the right direction and to Tim for the detailed help. I realized that all I had to was insert the amended example.css file into my html and that would change the background of the fragment depending upon its specifications. Pretty easy, right? Well, I certainly calmed down after I realized this.

I did my work mostly in Notepad and it wasn't even too hard to find the appropriate part of the code to modify. Frankly, I didn't even need Amaya after modifying the code and then opening it up in IE (which I really dislike, but it's the default browser that opens an html file on the laptop I was using)to make sure that my changes were working. Well, I take that back, but only a little. I did need an editor to change around the last paragraph (which for some reason didn't have some necessary spaces between words). Again, it was easier to do it in Kompozer, though, which is so much more straightforward than Amaya (for me, at least). I didn't even need to code. I made those changes in the GUI screen.

So after I did that main part, I was still confused about the annotations and wanted to make sure that my hyperlinks were enough. Therefore, after putting it up on the Unix server, I posted another message on the board with the link, he said it was OK. I hope so, especially since we haven't gotten our grades for Assignment 7 yet.