Saturday, August 16, 2008

Happy Birthday Madonna

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

Monday, August 4, 2008

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.

Friday, August 1, 2008

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!