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.

Thoreau, part 1

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent part of Sunday night working on this assignment for LIS 2600. I wish that I didn't have to put off this assignment until the last minute, but fortunately it only took me about an hour to complete. The instructions were quite vague and since I have the syllabus printed out, I didn't realize there was a hyperlink embedded in there until I went to the actual syllabus on Blackboard and found the necessary fragment there.

Anyhow, after reading the discussion board, I realized that instead of going to the address specified, I had to download Filezilla first and then type in that address as well as the port before uploading my work there. To be completely honest, I'm still not completely sure that I did this correctly. As of yesterday, I still haven't received a grade on this assignment. Yes, I was able to see my work (following another really useful link in the Discussion Board which pointed to someone else's work on this assignment) and hopefully, our instructors can see it, too. I almost posted the link to the dB just to prove that it worked. I did get that infamous 404 (or was it 403?) error the first time I tried to view it and I'm still not exactly sure why. That was OK, though, because I realized that I didn't do the assignment correctly the first time around and so I had to edit it (I used KompoZer, which I found much, much more user-friendly for a relative HTML novice like myself than Amaya). Anyway, fortunately I didn't even have to use any coding. I just edited the fragment in GUI mode (the default mode when the program opens), saved it as an HTML file and uploaded to Filezilla.

As a side note, I'm glad that I didn't post it to Google as some of the other students did. I know that Dr. Tomer won't penalize any of us since he initially said that it was OK, but it seems like those who used it will have more work on their hands for this week. Please correct me if I'm wrong. I almost ended up using it before figuring out that I could just download Filezilla and then upload my document there.

I just hope that this week's assignment (which I haven't started yet) will be as (relatively) painless. It seems like a continuation of last week's work with some added hyperlinks and formatting, but I don't wanna judge it until I do it. Onward!