What I have learned

I have learned so much in this class and every single thing is new to me. I didn't have any knowledge in coding and had it in my head it was impossible... But, its not and I am catching on pretty quickly. Blogging is also new to me and up until now I have never done it! So I am finally pleased to say I have tried and accomplished my first blog page. All up, I still have a lot to learn and I think project 2 is going to be a massive challenge, but I think I am ready!

Image Optimisation, simple menus and videos

All images taken from or on a website are optimised for internet use. They are smaller and save bandwidth. The easiest way to set a image for webpages is opening the picture in Adobe Illustrator and "saving for web."  An optimal size is around 20kbs-30kbs each and a bit of playing around works well.

The week after image optimisation we learned about building simple menus. First you must check through HTML and ID tags an then apply them wherever needs be. Selectors are important in this case as it allows us to choose specific parts of HTML without applying ID tags to everything. Examples of selectors are:

o   Natural HTML elements (body, div, p etc)

o   Universal selector (*)

o   ID selectors (#cat)

o   Class selectors (.dog)

Key things I like to remember are making sure the footer tag and main menu tag are different. Otherwise issues may arise and simply write new CSS for the footer menu. 

During the same class we also learned how to embed videos into a static HTML website. 

The key things are that you need a HTML file you can embed the video into and the rough scale of the video, eg. play time and pixel size. Then you must have access to it online. 

the next step is clicking on the video from a host site like youtube. Then selecting share and embed, then will be code that can be copied into your HTML file. 

Inspiration

My biggest inspiration in painting is the artist Lucian Freud. Now dead, but still living through his masterpieces. In my opinion he is the greatest portrait painter that has ever lived and every piece he turned out in its own right is a masterpiece. Capturing the essence of the individual and something a little more that cant be explained. This is a self portrait of Lucian and is one of my favourites.

CSS and HTML links

This week I learned the foundations of CSS and HTML coding. HTML in a nutshell is the basis for creating a webpage while CSS is used to control the presentation layer in webpages. It is more customizable in the presentation factor and better because styling can be kept separate from content. CSS is simply far easier to control presentation elements than HTML is.
For CSS to work with a HTML document you must first link it accordingly:

<link href="css/mainstyles.css" rel="stylesheet" 

type="text/css" />

 

This example is taken from my tutors notes and was not done by me. The pink text is the .css file path. I always make sure to open the .css file in a web browser before adding anymore, in case there is something wrong with the file.

Markup Structure and Twitter

This week as a class we learned about markup structure. It is simply a way to workout the structure for a design. Firstly it is key to figure out the code for the structure of the page.
We drew rectangles over the structure to simulate the design then we decided what box represented each tag. The final step is to write the code. We used Philippa, out tutors method of Div Map as a guide for code.


As part of this blog setup we were expected to create a Twitter feed. Twitter is one of the many social networking sites and is full of custom things that are different to other social media sites. Twitter is loaded witgh gadgets that allow you to customize you're own page. Each gadget is separate from the main content and you are able to delete, move or edit them at any time.