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Wow! This is my final blog post for my LIS753 class. The experience has been utterly amazing. This post is supposed to discuss my experience in creating a series of 3 web pages that we all had to code by hand.
Coding by hand is tough. One little “<” out of place and the whole thing does not work. In my experience, the overall objective was to get our hands dirty and play with html. Well, we did, and the fear of coding has been minimized. I know that I won’t have to code a page by hand in the future, but I can jump into a site and make some minor modifications by hand.
As for my thought process for the creation, well I knew what I wanted from the beginning. The pages that I am submitting are similar to the ones I created at the beginning of week 2. I have played around with color schemes and table layouts quite a bit. I don’t have a super creative side, so it took me a while, but I am satisfied. The use of CSS solved a major issue for me. One of the colors I really liked made the links very unpleasant. I was not looking forward to changing all these links, but with CSS it was really simple.
The content, bibliographic control, is due to my recent reading on the discussion taking place among bloggers and librarians about the future of such an endeavor. I tried to keep all the pages uniform in color and layout. I am a fan of minimalistic and simplistic design. I used the National Library Week video because it is fun, and we all need a good laugh from time to time. I could go on to write about how/why I choose to use certain code.
In the end I have learned much from this course. I have further constructed knowledge about us humans. I have been reading a great deal about love, separation and relatedness. Our awareness of our separation is what makes us human. Love and relatedness are attempts to bridge that separation gap. It is our reason for existence.
Social networking, virtual or online communities and even libraries are attempts to bridge the gap; to answer the question of separation. Whether someone is trying to gain a better understanding of the relatedness to the past – through libraries, or to conquer the feelings of loneliness and separation through some type of social networking application, the greater goal is to solve the human question. That question is why we are here. The answer is love and relatedness.
“In the end, these things matter most. How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you learn to let go?” – Buddhist saying
So I’ve updated my website and showed it to one of my students workers. She said that it was old school and that she can write much cooler sites, and that I should use Dreamweaver. How sad! But it seems that kids from 18 to 22 seem to know how to write web sites.
Check out this article in the Chronicle. A Stanford Professor shows that “Our virtual identity is not separate from our physical identity.” It shows that when you watch your avatar run, it motivates you to run in real life. Pretty cool.
