As I’ve watched you create (and sometimes scrap and re-create) your Print-to-Web projects, I’ve been impressed with how far you’ve come in just a few weeks of working with WordPres. Many of your draft sites looked excellent during our peer review session yesterday, and I can’t wait to see your completed sites next week!
As you put the finishing touches on your project, remember that the difference between a good site and a great site lies in the details. When you’re done marking up your content, make sure you spend enough time customizing the typography, the color scheme, and the images connected to your theme. Think about menus, hyperlinks, and sidebar widgets, and how you can use those elements to improve the functionality of your site.
I will be traveling for part of next week, so I’m taking this chance to share our plans for the coming two weeks. You’ll be completing some of this work while I’m gone, but if you have any questions, I will be available by email. Here’s a quick overview of the next two weeks:
- On Monday (10/20), your Unit #2 project is due before you come to class. Please review the assignment details before you submit your project to make sure you’ve followed the specific instructions for creating your site and writing your memo. In class, we will discuss the details of Unit #3, the Client Project, and we will finalize our team assignments for that project. I have sent an email to the class listserv with descriptions of the potential projects for Unit #3; please review those descriptions and send me an email by Sunday night with your client and teammate preferences.
- On Wednesday (10/22), I will be at conference, so we will not meet as a full class. In place of class (either during our class session or at another convenient time), you should meet with your Unit #3 team to begin drafting your memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the Client Project. Ideally, your client will join you for this meeting.
- On Monday (10/29), you will submit your team’s MOU for the Client Project, then we will talk about working with clients. Before you come to class, please read this series of articles:
- “Marry Your Clients,” by Shane Pearlman
- “In Defense of Difficult Clients,” by Rob Swan
- “No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas,” by Whitney Hess
- “Kick Ass Kickoff Meetings,” by Kevin M. Hoffman
- “20 Signs You Don’t Want that Web Design Project,” by Jeffrey Zeldman
You don’t need to print out all of these articles, but you should be ready to discuss them when you come to class. (When you’re done reading those, if you need a little diversion, check out Clients from Hell.)
- On Wednesday (10/31), we will shift gears and begin discussing Tubes, by Andrew Blum. Please read pages 1–67 and leave a comment on this post that contains a passage from Tubes that you want to discuss in class on Wednesday. (Leave your comment no later than Tuesday night, and if it’s relevant, connect your comment to one of your classmate’s comments.)
Whew — that was a long update! If you have any questions about these plans, please don’t hesitate to contact me. We’ll also have a chance in class on Monday to make sure that everyone knows what’s going on for the next few weeks.
“The preferred image of the Internet is instead a sort of nebulous electronic solar system, a cosmic “cloud.” I have a shelf filled with books about the Internet and they all have nearly the same picture on the cover: a blob of softly glowing lines of light, as mysterious as the Milky Way–or the human brain.”
-Tubes, p.6
“He blended the outlines of the continents with diagrams of the networks, “always layering something abstract on top of something that’s familiar, always looking to give it more meaning.” Other kinds of maps had long struggled with the same issues—like airline routes or subways. In both cases, the end points were more important than the paths themselves. They always had to balance the workings of the system internally with the external world it connected.”…”The geography of the Internet reflects the geography of the earth; it adheres to the borders of nations and the edges of continents.” (27-28)
“In that case, the networks that compose the Internet could be imagined as existing in three overlapping realms: logically, meaning the magical and (for most of us) opaque way the electronic signals travel; physically, meaning the machines and wires those those signals run through; and geographically, meaning the places those signals reach. The logical realm inevitably requires quite a lot of specialized knowledge to get at; most of us leave that to the coders and engineers. But the second two realms–the physical and geographic–are fully a part of our familiar world. They are accessible to the senses. But they are mostly hidden from view. In fact, trying to see them disturbed the way I imagined the interstices of the physical and electronic worlds.” (20)
“What was a network anyway?…Once I got my nerve up to ask the question at all, the whole thing started to make sense. It turns out that the Internet has a kind of depth. Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations–perhaps a university and a telephone carrier, say, or a telephone carrier contracted to a university. The networks carry networks” (Blum 19). I was not really sure what a network was. For me, it has always been used as one of those abstract, technical terms used to describe the Internet.
“It meant I had to get over the old, and really misleading metaphor of the “information highway”. It wasn’t really that the network is a ‘highway’ busy with ‘cars’ carrying data. I had to acknowledge the extra layer of ownership in there:the network is more like the trucks on a highway than the highway itself. That allows for the likelihood that many individual networks–”autonomous systems,”in the internet parlance–run over the same wires, their information-laden electrons or photons jostling across the countryside, like packs of eighteen-wheelers on the highway.
“It turns out that the internet has a kind of depth. Multiple networks run through the same wires, even though they are owned and operated by independent organizations–perhaps a university. The networks carry networks. One company might own the actual fiber-optic cables, while another operates the light signals pulsing over that fiber, and a third owns (or more likely rents) the bandwidth encoded in that light. China Telecom, for example, operates a robust North American network–not as a result of driving bulldozers across the continent, but by leasing strands of existing fiber, or even just wavelengths of light within a shared fiber.”
“Two Things surprised me about this. The first is that every IP address is by definition public kowledge; to be on the internet is to want to be found. The second is that the announcement of each route is based wholly on trust. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority gives out the prefixes, but anyone can put up a sign pointing the way. And sometimes that does go horribly wrong. In one well-known incedent in February 2008, the Pakistani government instructed all Pakistani Internet Providers to block YouTube, because of a video it deemed offensive. But an engineer at Pakistan Telecom, recieving the memo at his desk, misconfigured his router, and rather than removing the announced path to YouTube, he announced it himself — in effect declaring that he was YouTube. When two and a half minutes, the “hijacked” route was passed to routers across the Internet, leading anyone looking for YouTube to knock on Pakistan Telecom’s door. Needless to say, YouTube wasn’t there. For most of the world, YouTube wasn’t available at all for nearly two hours, at which point the mess was sorted out.” (Page 30)
“…I could begin to imagine the route my email to California had taken: it might have shot back the way I’d come, to New York, before heading cross-country, or it could have continued farther west to Ashburn, Virginia, where there was an especially significant network crossroads.” (26) I wonder where my emails from Blacksburg go if I send them across the country; or if I send them just across Blacksburg if they still hit some major hub somewhere.
“In that case, the networks that compose the internet could be imagined as existing in three overlapping realms: logically, meaning the magical (and for most of us) opaque way the electronic signals travel; physically, meaning the machines and wires those signals run through; and geographically, meaning the places those signals reach.”
“It is the sole documentary evidence of the ARPANET’s first successful transmission between sites – the moment of the internet’s first breath.”