Happy Birthday Madonna

You rock! I'll have to watch a Madonna movie to celebrate.

Blog: Course Reflection

What did you think of the course? The materials? The text books? Did you learn what you hoped to? What was missing? What was your favorite part of the course? How about your least favorite?

I did enjoy the content of the course. The projects were useful and helped to get the new material to sink in a little bit more. I can tell that I have a lot more practice to do, but feel that I have a solid start. The texts were good. My favorite part about the class is that it was "hands-on" and there was a lot of practice involved. My least favorite part about the class was the lack of discussion.

Blog: Exporting, Hotspots, Slices

Hotspots and slices only work if they are exported correctly... and images won't look good if they aren't exported and optimized properly. What part of this lesson made the least sense? What part was too obvious?

I could not get "Quick Export" to work correctly with FireWorks 9.0. It was trying to find additional HTML files in a default location and I was not able to fix it (I will try again later). Therefore I was not able to view my linked HTML with my browsers using "Quick Export". That seems like a nice feature, so I'm going to work on getting it going.

Another surprise was that FireFox and IE displayed the HTML files differently if they were stored on my PC. FireFox was picking up the links for my home_page_l8.htm that IE was not able to find. Once I put uploaded all the files onto the server, I was able to view the linked HTML files in both IE and FireFox.

I guess the obvious part of this lesson is that if you are going to shrink your file size, you are going to lose out on quality. The parts that made the least sense are the ones that I mentioned previous paragraphs.

Quinn and Her Fish

I walked out and found Quinn with her fish. Ty informed her that her fish needed water. This is what she came up with.

Blog: Image Maps and Slices

I wanted to have an idea of what I was looking for, so I decided to research navigation. I did a google on "navigation using slices" and found this tutorial. I really wanted to try it, but will do so later.

I found this explanation at Adobe that was helpful in regards to using Fireworks to create slices. It also had a good explanation of the difference between hotspots and slices.

Here are the three sites that I visited that use graphics for navigation.

1. Family Fun It appears that Family Fun is using slices to create their navigation. I am finding tables that contain graphics when I view the source code. This is an indicator of slices, according to the Adobe reference that I listed above.

2. The Fifty States Finally. I found a sight that I am pretty sure uses hotspots, since they have broken up a US map into various links. When I view the source code, I found a huge list of the polygon coordinates that broke up the original gif.

3. Barnes and Noble I did find a table that included images, which is an indication of slices. While searching the code, I discovered that B&N had a hotspots for "This Hour's Best Sellers" and a "MemberMap". I have a feeling that B&N is using slices without tables in some areas, since I am seeing rollovers occurring without tables. I don't know enough about this. So if you know, tell me!

Summer

I can't believe tomorrow is August 1st! I have been waiting for summer weather and I don't know what to think. My sister told me that she saw geese coming back to Creamer's Field. Here she told me how warm Fairbanks is in the summer and I was so excited! I missed the hot days of summer. At least we had a few.

A plus is that I discovered a new book. This one is called "The Spellman Files" and is by Lisa Lutz. It is a pretty good book. I make myself leave my books upstairs, otherwise I never put them down. Lisa is compared to Carl Hiassen (another fav of mine) and I've even heard someone say Janet Evanovich (she is the best).

Now...off to Fireworks! How many others had to try out buttons--I did. I couldn't just couldn't skip that chapter....

Cuil

Cuil is a new search engine that was developed by former Google employees. It is easy to use and is providing okay search results. I'm taking away my recommendation to try it out and am now saying the search results aren't excellent. I'm bad, I know.

My Reason:
I do like the wide variety of search results and many of them seem relevant to my search. However, it does seem to have a few issues.

Some of the pages are dated (which isn't always a bad thing), I got a page of repeated words (since this engine does content based search and not just meta tags) and I pulled up a nasty site that must have had embedded text or meta tags that made it seem relevant. So, I wouldn't let your kids use this search engine (or demonstrate this engine in front of a group of people!) until the kinks are worked out. Argh! Gross!

Important note: you may think that the site is safe to go to based on the picture that is displayed by the link--it is not!!! Yuck! Double gross!! I can't believe I saw that stuff and good thing my kids weren't watching.