When the semester's over, I can officially...

Read books that have nothing to do with libraries, listen/play music again, clean my room, go on vacation (camping, perhaps?), and just generally enjoy life instead of loathing it.

However, the bill I got for the fall semester threatens to rain on my parade, as its 4x higher than it usually is, due to a tax they put on the tuition remission employees receive. I guess I can't complain, its still cheaper than what most people are paying, but the whole reason I'm working the crappy job I have for the university is so I don't go into debt for this degree. I guess they figure the people that are really strapped for cash will just prolong their stay in their job/program, that way the university can get the most out of them. Blackmail! Extortion, I say! Sigh. Too bad no one's listening.

One last thing- as Scott pointed out in his blog, 'what you see is what you get' is definitley not the case with web page editors. I would line things up a certain way with Dreamweaver, only to have it show up all caddy-wompus on the web. WTF? Whatever. The webpage is done. Just the portal, a final, and a massive project to worry about. Sigh.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel is a Train

Er, lets hope its not. Seriously though, ONLY ONE WEEK OF CLASS LEFT THIS SEMESTER! Dear lord am I going to be happy when this semester is over. This semester redefined the term "existential breakdown" for me. Hopefully I don't have another like it anytime soon. Things could be worse, I guess... At least I'm not going to have to start job hunting next week.

And here is where the reference for the title of this entry comes from.

Crisis averted... for now.

So, after consulting my web-page designing roommate, I figured out why my portal wasn't posting that picture. Some thing was up with the source code for the picture that was making it not display. I'm not able to make the changes on it now, but probably will by Wednesday or so. I also plan on changing one of my website links to my portal page. I'm sure something else will go wrong in the course of making the portal, but for now, at least I have the first problem solved (hopefully- I guess I won't really know if Jo's suggestion will work until I try it). A critical update I'm sure all of you needed.

Website afterthoughts...

So, it took a few tries and lots of advice from friends, but its done. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Like I was mentioning in the HTML post, I'm surprised how easy (for me) it was to pull it off. It gets me excited on the possibility of making another... If it weren't for this class, I probably would have never ever bothered to try it, so kudos to Prof. Dan Wilson and Co. for giving me the proverbial swift kick in the butt to make it happen.

BOOYAKASHA!

Website is complete. Click the link to the right to check it out. Now, the portal....

He Taught Me Lies

I initially learned about HTML by frequenting a message board I usually hang out on. And it was really only because I wanted to be able to post pictues, so I had to learn the code (< img src="picture url" >). Beyond posting pictues, bolding/italicizing text, and now making embedded links in text, I don't have much familiarity with HTML. The WYSIWYG editors we've been using to make webpages are pretty convenient for people like me, to be ignorant of source coding but still able to create webpages. I'm not entirely sure if the effect of keeping people relatively in the dark in regards to coding structures that editors like Dreamweaver, Nvu or FrontPage have is a negative or not (you can view the source code in all of these products, granted). Either way, I'm appreciative, if somewhat dependent on it for this type of task, of them.

And I have to give credit where credit is due- some friends of mine have a band that was the inspiration for the title of this post. You can find out more about them here.

Creation

Of websites, that is. I'm pretty into it. A lot more than I anticipated. I finally feel apart of the 21st century. Its about time, right? Its good to know that there will be one tangible skill I can take away from a class, which is always nice. The website I'm working on now still needs some work, but its shaping up gradually. I'm trying to decide on whether to use the Feed2J or Feedburner/Buzzboost to upload my RSS feed with. The design idea I have in mind might mean I go with Feed2J, since I'm not sure if I can pull it off with Feedburner. We'll see...

Feelin' it.

I don't like the summer time. You can be completely naked, and still be hot, and there's nothing you can do. At least in winter, you can layer up and put on a blanket and be ok. Blech, whatever.

Is this thing working?

Well, I tried to get some more progress made on the webpage. Its going slowly, but alright I guess. The main thing I'm having trouble with is having my images link to the webpages they're supposed to represent. I'm kind of at a loss as how to make it happen. When I was putting my images into the table, the Properties window at the bottom of the page (I'm using Dreamweaver) has a box where you can enter in a Link. I put the appropriate URLs in this box for each image, but none of them work- except the one for my blog. Whenever I click on the image/link in my webpage, it takes me to a Pitt page stating "File not found," etc. The URL of this Pitt page is http://www.pitt.edu/~mjcst84/www.carnegielibrary.org, for example, which tells me that the Link box I was entering in the URLs is for another folder/page related to my homepage, which isn't what I want. But I don't know how else to make it work...

I'm also not sure if I should be selecting server software like Cold Fusion or whatever... It seems to me, though, that stuff is more related to setting up the Root file/page that all subsequent folders will be opening up from, which is kind of what the website is already doing. I'm just gonna have to email someone about this, I think...

Documentation

This might be coming late for some people, but here's a .pdf explaining how to make a website at Pitt, and a link to Pitt's Technology Documents archives, which have more .pdf's for helping one to conquer Fineas T. Philibuster.

Shine on...

RIP Syd Barrett. 'Astronomy Domine' and 'Interstellar Overdrive' still melt my brain to this day. More info on him can be found here and here.