During Week 3, we will continue to work on the Online Résumé assignment, move from CSS styling to CSS positioning, and introduce our next assignment: the CSS Zen Garden Redesign.
On Tuesday, we will briefly review the reading assignments for the day (see the calendar for details), then spend most of the class period in workshop mode. I want to give you plenty of time to ask specific questions about your résumés and work through some common problems that you may be encountering with this assignment. In order for this workshop to be successful, you need to come to class with an almost-finished draft of your résumé page, which means that you’ll need to spend time this weekend creating a new style sheet for your résumé and begin thinking about what you want your homepage to look like.
On Thursday, we will wrap up our in-class work on the Online Résumé assignment and begin discussing the CSS Zen Garden Redesign assignment. Before you come to class, be sure to spend some time exploring the CSS Zen Garden and come to class ready to show us a few of your favorite designs and explain why you like them.
As we discussed in class on Thursday, your ongoing blogging assignment begins this week. Your blog can focus on any topic, allowing you to pursue one or more of your “focused obsessions.” There are no hard and fast rules about how often you need to post or how long your posts need to be–I just want to see you exploring the world of blogging to find out if it holds any interest for you. To get started, select a new theme/design for your WordPress.com blog and add your first post to the blog before Tuesday. In a few weeks, we’ll revisit the blogging assignment to see how it’s going and make some revisions, if needed.
After class on Thursday, a few of you mentioned that I was going a bit too fast with my in-class tutorials. I’ll try to slow things down a bit next week. If you’re falling behind during our in-class coding sessions, please jump in and ask me to slow down or review something you missed. At the same time, please remember that many of our in-class sessions are reviews of material covered in the Castro book. If you aren’t keeping up with the readings in the book, now is the time to get back on track. In a few weeks, it will be too late to catch up on the fundamentals, and your ability to succeed on the major assignments (and the exams) will be greatly diminished.
Last but not least, if you get stuck working on your résumé this weekend, or if you’re completing the readings but still feel like the concepts we’ve discussed up to this point aren’t “clicking,” please come see me during my office hours on Tuesday or Thursday.
Enjoy your weekend!