As the web continues to grow in size and popularity, more and more professions require a basic understanding of the core technologies behind the internet. This course will provide undergraduate students with a working knowledge of HTML, CSS, domain registration, web hosting, JavaScript, server-side scripting, FTP, and more. We will look at how these technologies are encapsulated into content management systems, spending considerable time working with WordPress as an example. It is becoming increasingly important for individuals to take control of how they are portrayed online, and this course will explore how individuals can use these tools to do that. The course will include discussion of popular hosted publishing tools and social networking sites, as well, looking at how they contribute to an overall online presence. The final project will include developing a functional web site using the concepts and the technologies discussed throughout the course.

(For my Sooner friends, I want to assure you that UTD has no relationship to UT in Austin. It is completely independent — just like University of California and UCLA are independent — and UTD has its own, non-Longhorn mascot. So everything is good there.)

UPDATES

• 11/18/2009: Paul Boag’s book Website Owners Manual came out last week, a book I had been anxiously awaiting. I downloaded the PDF version, and I will definitely be using it as the textbook for my course.
• 11/29/2009: There’s now an entry for my course in the official UTD online coursebook: I’m affectionately known as “-Staff-” right now in the listing.
• 12/02/2009: I have started my course web site: ATEC 3361 / Spring 2010. I need to add quite a lot of content before January 1, but I think it’s taking shape.

Last year was also a busy year for my myth studies. I launched my online myth magazine Journey to the Sea back in July, and I have now published eight monthly issues. When Julie gave me the different design concepts for my freelance cards, I thought one of them would look great for Journey to the Sea cards. She changed the background from red to blue, replaced the rounded rectangles with seagulls, and generally tweaked the design to produce something that looks quite nice. I added a small box of these cards to my order, which will be useful for promoting the site.

It has been an incredibly fun process putting these two brands together, and I expect great things to unfold for both of them in 2009.

NAWBO Houston

This non-profit organization’s web site had stagnated because it was too difficult to update. Julie provided a fresh new design that I built into WordPress, which has made it easier for them to add news items and update the calendar of events.

Joseph & Company

This client hired us to design a smart, professional-looking web site that clearly reflected their image as an expert in their field. The client insisted on having some Flash animation, which Julie created. I don’t work much with Flash (I personally find the animation and the potential error messages distracting), so this gave me a good chance to experiment with the swfobject JavaScript library that incorporates Flash files into web pages as cleanly as possible.

I’d been wanting to try out this library for some time, and I was quite happy  with the results. If the user does not have Flash installed, I coded the site to use static images instead of the Flash files so the user never sees an error message. I thought this was a good solution since the animation was not essential to the content.

Sagemont Blogs

Julie provided a new design for this church’s web site, and the church had its own in-house development team that wrote the new code for it. I joined the redesign project near the end to install and configure WordPress MU, a version of WordPress that powers multiple blogs. (Each of their 20+ ministries now has a blog they can run themselves, and all the blogs can be managed centrally by one administrator.) It was a bit of a challenge integrating their new site built in Microsoft technologies on one domain with PHP blogging software on a different domain, but I think it turned out fairly well.

J. Riley Creative

After collaborating with Julie on client projects, it seemed like a good idea to to collaborate on some of our own personal projects. She had created a new design for her portfolio site over the summer, but she needed someone to build it. We launched the site last week. It was a fun and challenging site. Little design details are a lot more important on a graphic designer’s web site than on most other sites. (The font stack, for example, containing twelve different specified fonts and two different font weights, was the most complex one I had ever created.) I was happy to get experience using some new JavaScript tools for the  animated gallery on the home page and for the image zoom on the project pages.

(Julie will be doing some design work for one of my projects that I hope to launch in the spring or summer. Stay tuned.)

I have continued to work more with WordPress for all of these projects, and I really like the power it offers. It began as a platform for creating blog sites, so I usually have to customize it a bit to make it work for more static, corporate sites like these. But it really is a great tool for clients to manage their own web sites, and a lot of development has been done on it over the past year. Julie and I have a couple more client projects lined up for the end of this year and the beginning of next year, to which I am definitely looking forward.

One new improvement to my HTML/CSS development process is worth mentioning. I have found it extremely useful to use a reset stylesheet. This code removes all the CSS style information applied to HTML elements by the browser. Since browsers all have slightly different defaults, this has been a tremendous help in getting sites to work the same in different browsers. One unforeseen benefit is that it makes tools like Firebug even more useful; since the default styles have been stripped away, every style is explicitly declared and therefore visible through these tools.

After the reset stylesheet, I also apply a typgraphy stylesheet from the Blueprint CSS framework (with slight modification), which sets up some really nice default styles that are then the same across all browsers. (I haven’t used any of the other stylesheets included in this framework; I still to prefer to handcraft my CSS layouts by hand.) I combine these two stylesheets together into a 4 KB stylesheet, pretty small and well worth it for the consistency and the ease of development it adds.

• The Fall of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost — I provide a historical survey of the literary criticism to Paradise Lost, showing how interpretations of the poem have fluctuated between the two contrary themes he introduced in a previous article.
• Journey to the Sea: The Name — I explain the origins and the meaning of the name of this site.
• Magic in the World of Alvin Maker: Red Prophet (by Laura Gibbs) — Laura continues her series on the “ecology of magic” used by storytellers, looking at the balance and harmony of the “greensong” sung by the American land in Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet.

The article on Paradise Lost grew out of my study of the poem last summer and can be seen as an extension of the thoughts I expressed about Milton’s Satan at that time. (Read that post from last summer.)

I do not plan to announce every issue of Journey to the Sea here on my personal site. If you are interested in following those updates, please subscribe to one of the RSS feeds over there:

• My Articles: http://journeytothesea.com/author/randyhoyt/feed/
• All Articles: http://journeytothesea.com/feed/

The plan is still to publish one issue of this same size (three articles, a thousand words each) once a month. I’ve lined up some interviews and some guest contributors, which should start appearing with issue three in early September.