There's an episode of Dexter's Lab called The Big Cheese in which Dexter is trying to learn french for school. Using the age-old trick of learning by osmosis, Dexter creates a record (an LP, actually) that plays his vocabulary aloud while he sleeps. Of course, things go awry when player skips and repeats only one phrase. In the morning, Dexter can say nothing but "Omelette de fromage" (Cheese omelette). Fortunately, that phrase seems to be the answer to every question he is asked, and eventually leads him to superstardom.
I feel kind of like that this morning. Although, I have yet to speak to anyone in exclusively terms of HTML tags, I think I probably could.
I spent a good portion of the weekend working with Mom to get her pages in shape for class. I keep telling her that her pages on San Francisco look really good even in their unfinished state, especially in comparison to all of the other crap that's out there.
Here's an example of what I mean. This is the first Google search result for "San Francisco trip". Note that there are only a few pictures on each page, the navigation is somewhat shoddy, and the text rarely corresponds with the pictures you're viewing (especially in those sections where there is more than one page of pictures). There are quite a few pages that also simply don't exist.
Mom's page, on the other hand, has a nice San Francisco map background, has very nice navigation links (using her pins from the different places), and quite nice digital pictures. The text that's there even goes along with the photos, and there is at least one movie in there.
Anyway, I really need to write some kind of tutorial with exercises, something interesting and useful other than what junk they typically give in the book. I remember the stories of the Bit Brothers books and thing that something like that geared toward a more mature audience might be appropriate. Also, some of the stuff we did in DEEP when we were learning programming would be useful, like how to "read" a program to figure out what it does. Very useful.
I really need to do some work on my own site or it won't be ready to turn in on Thursday. I would really like to have a large portion of it done for class tomorrow so that I can have the teacher review it before I call it done. That is, I want to make sure that my efforts in other areas will account for some of the stuff I might have missed because of my more targeted idea.
For example, I don't want to put a thing on my page to calculate days until retirement because it's completely useless to anyone looking for an XHTML editor. That said, I want to replace it with something else. I'm not sure exactly what, but I'll figure something out. I figure that if I write the whole Javascript soure myself, that's probably worth something. But whatever. I can probably churn out the retirement thing in ten or twenty minutes, depending on whether I'm eating potato chips or a salad while I'm typing.
The real issue is where I'm going to find time to take all of the screen captures I need for the site, and then composite them with the text that I have not yet written about them. Sheesh.
Less than. Div. Space. Style. Equals. Quote. Font dash weight. Colon. Bold. Quote. Greater than. The end. Less than. Slash. Div. Greater than.
