In the PHP course at BCIT, we learned some important concepts, such as:

• sessions
• cookies
• arrays
• file management
• MySQL
• and more . .

To me, the course was marred by the mistakes in the course materials as well as examples that didn't work.

In December 2009, the Surrey Drupal Group met to discuss the top Drupal modules, tools and other resources that make our life easier. This PDF file is a copy of the results.

It's time for the bi-annual operating system refresh for my home office, so I decided to upgrade my laptop from Windows Vista to Windows 7. What I didn't realize was that my backups were on the edge of failure.

In my role as a web site administrator for a few soccer organizations, I have to publish contact lists (on my Windows based computer) for the executive and coaches.  These lists are generated by volunteers and are always in Microsoft Excel.

The challenge that I have, is that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets often don't translate well when being cut and pasted into a HTML based WYSIWYG editor and then published to the Internet. I haveve seen things like:

Introduction

This article provides a brief review of BCIT's MDIA program for aspiring web designers and developers as well as their new Desire 2 Learn to support online classrooms.

The D2L Environment

The new Desire 2 Learn environment provides features to similate a classroom environment such as:

• Discussion Area
• Presentation Area
• Quizzes & Surveys
• Content Publishing
• Calendar
• Email
• And more . .

This environment looks a lot like Microsoft Sharepoint and is configurable for each class. There's also an overall Portfolio section as well a a blog. One thing I appreciated is that they can keep your previous classes online.

Rating: A

General:

There were 5 assignments in this course, each building upon the knowledge gained in the previous assignments. Your first assignment starts off with a knowledge of just a few HTML tags and NO CSS. From there, you add more tags, but you are NOT allowed to go beyond the material you have taken. It's not until assignment 5, that you are allowed to use CSS at all.

The good:

This was a good course to get introduced to the way they do things in the MDIA series of courses. You are supplied with reading material, online forums, publishing capabilities. You need to submit assignments that get marked and so on.

This Javascript assignment revolved around making a simple Weather web site, and it required use of Javascript math and date functions.

To me, the trick for this assignment was to come up a cool temperature generator. Most of the rest was image and innerhtml updates which we did a lot of in assignment 2. Rather than use links to select cities, I used a 'select' field in conjunction with some Javascript and then modified the DOM to place images and text. Much more interactive that way.

I continued to work on layout techniques and tried out Layer Comps in Photoshop with limited success. Will continue to press on.

Finished. Wow! What an assignment. There are better looking ones out there in the class, but mine was the only one that used the select field to select a city. That took a bit of work in Firefox, and much more so to make it IE compatible.

Update: I was the only one in the class that used the select field. In addition, the temperature generator was really cool. The instructor found a mistake in my timezone calculations and I lost marks big time there. Maybe I should have spent less time learning the cool stuff in order to get the basics right. :(

This assignment is about being a tour operator, and we were given a couple of inspiration sites.

Here's how I'm (currently) going about laying out this assignment:

1. Load up Firefox with the'Fireshot' image capture add-on.
2. Copy a 960 column 'PSD template' to my assignment directory and open it with Photoshop.
3. With Firefox, search for some inspiration sites.
4. Use Fireshot to capture the entire page and paste it as a new layer in Photoshop.
5. Repeat for a few sites (make sure you rename the layer to the URL of the site).
6. Once done, I may wish to cut up sections of the pages into blocks, each on its own layer.
7. Create a 'mock' layout using the various blocks.
8. Hide everything except for my 'mock' layout, and lower it's opacity and set it as the background layer.
9. Now I start designing my own site in Photoshop loosely based on the 'mock' one.
10. Of course, my PSD to CSS conversion will make it looser still.
11. Then there's the Javascript component. Yikes!

PSD template:

http://github.com/nathansmith/960-grid-system/blob/568eeac257602df35a920b18eafc8a5bb6e8825d/templates/photoshop/960_grid_12_col.psd

Update:

- Playing with Photoshop built-in grid sizes & colour contrast
- Turning off template once I am happy with overall layout
- Printing out pages of the inspiration sites
- Lay out major sections first, then work on detail
- Using Photoshop folders and name them
- Using shape layers drawing mode and not fill pixels and using masks for rounded corners
- www.sxc.hu has a LOT of free stock images and graphics
- I'm developing core HTML/CSS first, then adding Javscript later
- Yikes! Don't forget cross browser testing.  Sure wish there was a Firebug for all browsers.

Update 2:

- Most of the HTML/CSS is done
- The key to most of the Javascript effects are found in the examples,
I'm thinking 6-3, 6-11, 6-5, 6-8  and 8-8 (for a random image on the
main page).
- Using 'mod' or '%' saves some lines of code when going through a slideshow

Finished.  I was really happy with how this looked in the end. Sure it could have done with some more polish, but the image management was really cool.

This course is titled "Using New Media on the Web: Flash".

• #1 - Not to be submitted
• #2 - First assignment with basic tweens
  
• #3 - Use motion tween and masks
• #4 - Flash website with scenes and buttons
  
• #5 - Add sounds and images

I received 10/30 on my final assignment. The teacher didn't like the fact that I deviated from the course and delved into AS3 programming. He really wanted his tweens, and my mark suffered when I didn't produce.