CIOS 110 Lesson 8 #1

If you're going to set up shared computers for a group of employees, you'll need to create multiple accounts. One of the first thing you will want to do is set up two administrator accounts. Make sure you set up at least two so that if one administrator is not in the office, another person will be able to log in and make changes if necessary. Each of the employees will need their own local user account in the workgroup, and these will be limited accounts. You'll set up the initial passwords, and employees will be able to change them when they log in.

CIOS 256 Lesson 10

Ah, Fireworks. I've never used this program before this lesson. Based on what I've learned, I'm not certain how much I will use it in the future. Most of what we did was basic stuff that I'm used to doing in Photoshop. Can Fireworks do it better and possibly quicker? Probably. But there's a saying about old dogs and new tricks. I've been using Photoshop for print editing for years. It will take a while before I default to another program.

I do find it easier to resize images for the web with Fireworks. Also, I don't have to "Save for Web." It's already planning on saving for web. Only time will tell how much I use it, though.

CIOS 256 - Lesson 9

So we're not doing the group blog anymore, but this lesson exhorts me to keep up with the posting on my individual blog. Even better, it encourages me to write about anything at all, not necessarily class materials.

Well, let me introduce you to my real blog, aka blog posting central. You'll probably learn far more than you ever wanted to know about me. (In fact, you should definitely skip the entry that begins with all the "TMI ahead" warnings from last month.) But if you want blog posting, that's where I do it.

CIOS 256 - Lesson 8

Hmmm, check some of the sites I regularly visit to see if they are CSS or XHTML? Man, it seems that the only thing I visit with any regularity are graphic design blogs. And those had better have some fancy designs.

Let's look at a basic site. This a coworker's personal page, as linked from our company website. Greg Newby is our chief scientist. His page is pretty simple and straightforward. One long page of text with center headers, text links and big letters for the start of each paragraph. But he does use a stylesheet, newby.css, to achieve all this.

A much fancier site I visit daily is the gossip site Jezebel. The page source for this looks MUCH more complex than Greg's page, but it still has stylesheet, or rather several of them, linked in the head of the document.

CIOS 256 - Lesson 7

Typography – one of my favorite subjects! No, really, I can go on for hours about fonts. People often smile when I say that, but then when I actually get started, they get nervous.

Anyway, to take up the challenge of the group blog (even though the group blog is apparently no more), I present good and bad typography sites.

The good: Superfresh / Finch
Unusual font for a header. I like the color blocks for the dates, which help to visually set each entry apart. And excellent white space (or gray space, as the case may be).

The bad: Mark Boulton
For a blog that is supposed to focus on design and other web matters, I find his typography difficult to read. Part of the problem is that the page is just too full of text. Technically it’s a 3-column layout, but it’s very jumbled. The fonts are small and there is not much size, weight or color distinction between them.

For online typography resources, you don’t need to look much further than ilovetypography.com which will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about fonts.

If you’re in the market for some new fonts, try dafont.com or urbanfonts.com. Veer.com has excellent fonts as well, but you’ll have to pay for those.

I think the lessons are getting a little better. It’s more due to the design of the course, as we are now creating our own pages rather than just completing the assignments from the book. As I’ve said before, I want to feel like I can design my own pages, not just make changes to existing pages.

CIOS 256 Reflection #1

Well, I suppose I'm coming at this reflection a little late and from greatly changed circumstances. When I signed up for this class, I was anticipating doing a little web site maintenance for one of my UAF jobs, and thus wanted to study Dreamweaver a bit. My attempts to start the course were greatly delayed by a change of jobs, and now I find that I have had to build sites from scratch for my new position. They're not by any means pretty, but I did them. Now if only they had been put up instead of languishing on someone's desk for the past months, I could show them to you.

I think in terms of the speed of the class, the lessons thus far have been proceeding at a good pace. My first instinct was to say that we should have done more than just putting a few lines of text on the first pages we created. However, I can say that because I have done more than that in Dreamweaver. For a beginner, I think that working through to the point of creating files and putting that line or two of text up is more than enough.

Lesson 7

Three backup utilities:

Acronis True Image Home 11

Runs from within Windows or a Liunx-based boot disk

Exact copy of the PC or only backup important data

Test software is safe mode, then decide whether or not to install it

Continue working during backups

Symantec Norton Save & Restore

Full system and incremental backups

Backup file encryption

Restore from system failure or recover data without OS

Create an exact backup copy

NovaBackup

Wizard guides for PC Luddites

Select all files of a certain type, no matter where they are on your hard drive

Disaster Recovery cd to completely restore the computer

Backup computer across a network with Peer-To-Peer