Website Ammending

The final assignment for our Advanced Scripting was for each student to produce a website structure that would house their eventual graduating portfolio, essentially the first phase of the portfolio class that comes later in the Web Design and Interacitve Media course schedule. I decided that I would use some of the javascript coding techniques that we had learned througout the quarter to add a major feature to current portfolio site, as well as adding several updates to my established portfolio sections. The sketched layout (as shown) placed the new slideshow driven featured project section (Labeled A) directly below or next to the welcoming passage on the site’s homepage.

Image Gallery

In an atttempt to play with some of the java script gallery effects available at the dynamic drive website, I created a demo page using two image gallery scripts. Unfortunately, after my attempt, I’m left with two blank blocks where the image galleries should be. Can you see any errors in the code?

http://develon.aisites.com/imd233/week7/banner.html

Guest Speaker

After entering my Advance Scripting class on Tuesday prepared to dive deeper into my occasionally confusing introduction to Javascript, I was surprised to see that we had a second guest speaker. Naturally, I assumed the man preparing his laptop to display on our class monitor must have come to explain some complex aspect of Javascript coding that we had not covered up to that point. Fortunately, I was wrong. Our speaker introduced himself as Shawn McCraw, owner of McCraw Design, a branding and design firm with pretty much the most extensive high-paying client history list I’ve ever seen in a single portfolio.  We spent the next 4 hours viewing a pdf presentation he put together that described his work and several design/professional tips we could use in our own personal path.

The showing was a mixture of anecdotal recounts of Mr. McCraw’s career as a business consultant and company branding design specialist. As we listened and move on to ask the questions that stood out to each of us, two point of advice stuck with me. The first resurfaced a couple of times throughout the presentation – the notion that we should not depend on our academic experience when seeking employment. While I heard this sentiment many times before from various professional speakers, Mr. McCraw’s words carried more weight with me due to his exceptional career. I couldn’t help but cringe inside thinking about how much money I could have saved by initially making an attempt at self teaching through his list of online and print resources, but I guess it’s all water under the Sallie Mae bridge at this point.

The second note worthy point of the lecture dealt more with an external evaluation of professionalism and I felt empowered as soon as I heard the segway. “I can remember a couple of times when I had to fire clients.” Why I  never considered this possibility with my own history of situations where I was more professional than my clients is a mystery. I was excited to negotiate jobs after hearing this, the idea that I could literally just cut the people off in the future who don’t treat me the way I feel my reliability, skill set, and record deserve to be treated.

While I will admit that I felt extremely intimidated at times throughout the lecture, there were many qualities that struck me as motivational  listening to Mr. McCraw explain how he got to his current position. Also, he seemed to view each detail of all his experiences as problems to simply be solved. I know I could benefit from attempting to emulate that outlook.

Session 1 – Intro to JavaScript

After covering a host of information related to scripting languages and web design with The Art Institute of Charlotte, I got to compare a difference in sequence with The Art Institute of Austin.

The first session of Advanced Scripting covered a basic history of the internet, opening with an explanation of  distinctions between the web and the internet. The internet is an infrastructure of connected hardware including computers and servers, that allow information to be shared across various distances. The data that is housed on that infrastructure is considered “the web”.

In regard to websites, the XHTML code language is used to provide the structure of webpages, while the Cascading Style Sheet language is used to provide styling, and JavaScript is used to provide action that occurs on those webpages.

JavaScript is divided into three parts:

* ECMA script for functionality
* Document Object Module for peripheral interface
*Browser Object Module for interaction with the browser outside the context of the page

During server-side actions, all processing power used in a web site occurs on the server’s side of the sequence.

During client side actions, the processing is run in the browser only and use focuses on the browser and computer processing capabilities.

Web 2.0 is a concept used to describe the first notable stage of internet evolution. It focuses on changes in general design aesthetic to cleaner, more design conscious trends, as well as a shift in content towards more user-generated means.

Ajax combines several scripting technologies for asynchronous events that take place on the user-side.

Rich Internet Applications are sophisticated applications that use the internet to operate, but are not dependant on functioning within a web browser.

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!